dreamtofus

[dreamtofus]

belief

pairing: joel miller x former f!sex worker!reader

wc: 9k

summary: Joel makes sure you get home safely.

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), brief smut [fingering], brief joel pov, confrontation, self deprecation, internalized shame, guilt, dissociation, ptsd, emotional vulnerability, mentions of poverty, panic and anxiety, spiraling thoughts, depression, crying, mentions of and fear of violence and domestic abuse, mentions of past sex work, mentions of death and grief, joel doing everything but saying words at first, confessions of love and an incredibly soft joel miller

a/n: as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading! I'm so sad we're almost to the end of this series, but thank you for going on this journey with me <3 for those of you lusting after makeup sex...patience is a virtue 🤭

Joel buys you a cherry coke, as promised. 

The smell of perchitor and brewing rain drifts through the truck’s open window, curling along your sweaty brow and collarbone in a warm arc. The air feels sticky and doesn’t help the nausea still constricting around your lungs. 

But tilting your face into the warm air is better than breathing in the air conditioner’s refrigerated, recycled smell, the cloying scent of Joel that pervades the cab. Acrid acidity and the salt of anxious sweat, pressing and pulsingly yellow, the familiarity of softened leather and bergamot tinted cologne and desert dust and blooms. 

You close your eyes and relish in the little tendrils of it that filter through the rain clean air, human and close and sickeningly safe. 

The cool glass of the window feels nice against your skin, cutting sharply against your cheekbone, saving you from the cardinal sin of falling asleep in his passenger seat as he drives, cocooned in a terrible feeling of solace. 

After everything, he’s still a comforting, safe, presence at your back; even if your hips and ribs are turned away from him so you don’t have to see him. So you don’t have to watch the slow rise and fall of his broad chest, wonder at the visibly shaken expression on his face at the clinic, the dark circles and puffy bags beneath his eyes. He had looked like you felt, like he’d had an exceptionally long night, like recent weeks had not been kind to him.

You don’t look at him, too, because you don’t want to feel like you’re sitting directly beneath sun that, though warm, might also cause something cancerous to sprout inside you. 

True to his word, Joel does not speak to you. 

The radio remains silent. 

You sit with the silence, the unbroken seal of it, the white capped foam of it. 

Despite the rattle of the window against your skull, the exhaustion in your bones causes you to drift in and out of sleep, until a greasy filmy scent layers over the pretty lavender of the rain soaked scented clouds, effectively yanking you from sleep.

When you straighten and glance over, rubbing one eye and surely smearing mascara beneath it, Joel is being handed drinks through the window by a fast food employee that frowns at the clouds gathering thickly and uncommonly in the dawn sky. 

Joel hands you a plastic cup and a paperwrapped straw, moisture already beading along the side in the early heat, ice melting in the space between the window and the truck’s AC. You’re so focused on fitting the straw into the lid that you don’t notice Joel handing you something else until you look up again. 

An icy cup of water to accompany the cherry coke. 

You accept it grudgingly, shoving it into the cupholder, as he pulls out of the parking lot and clears his throat. “Sorry, Cher,” he says as you sip at the coke, nausea abating a little as it settles in your stomach. “You’re gonna have to tell me where to go.” 

His voice breaks at the end, hoarse, but from what you aren’t sure. 

“Okay,” you agree softly, not liking the close intimacy of his voice in the confined space. 

You give him directions as he drives,, watching the motion picture of your familiar town flit by in ridges and crevices of desert rock, the tumbling of dusty bodies through the air. 

You try to continue not to look at Joel and fail miserably, mesmerized by the picture of him after so many weeks without; the attractive ripple of muscle in his forearm and bicep, the veins that run beneath his skin that your lips and tongue and teeth all know, the wide splay of his legs, the confident, competent drape of his hand over the rim of the steering wheel, the contemplative scratch of his other hand over his beard. 

His hair is longer than when you’d last seen him, the dark curl of graying brown threaded behind his ear. 

Terrible, that he should look like this. Awful, that you think he’s the prettiest man you’ve ever laid eyes on. 

Plagued by sudden images of him and you in this truck, you look away. Scooting across the bench seat to press yourself into his side, to fall asleep against his shoulder as he drove, teasingly flashing him, Joel eating your pussy in the open door of the cab, Joel fucking you in the bed of the truck, more than once, hips and knees and limbs folded together, crumpled at each other’s edges. 

You push the thoughts away, watch the morning horizon transform, the blistering purple stormclouds making the orange earth glow more violently, silverbacked, glinting traffic of the early riser sweeping into the distance.

The overgrown parking lot of your apartment building greets you eventually, the gray gleam of windows looming like watchful eyes, reflecting the thickening storm. If Joel thinks anything of the dripping AC units and the moldy ecosystems gathering slowly in the puddles they create, the green folded along the accordion joints; if he thinks anything of the weeded path, the fractured pavement, the peeling, sunbleached walls, he says nothing.   

You take the stairs with him at your back, carrying your bag and drinks and hovering one hand just above your skin, and you cannot fault him for that because the woozy feeling trembles like lightning beneath your skin. He’s afraid you might fall, and it reminds you of your first time with him, his hand politely at your back, not groping you or crawling beneath your skirt. 

Maybe you would be nervous to have him in your apartment, but you can’t be bothered to think about it or care at that moment. 

You unlock the door and let him inside, just as the first crash of thunder splits the sky at its seams. The interior of your apartment is a gloomy gray and too warm, the fickle air conditioner still only half doing it’s job. 

The rain follows a moment later, a heavy thrum of blunted white noise. 

Joel follows you over the softly creaking floors, past the vibrations shaking the walls with the violence of the downpour against the roof, pausing only briefly to twist the lock back into place.

You turn to him in the mouth of your bedroom doorway, among the looming shadows of your messy sheets and half packed cardboard moving boxes. “I’m mad at you,” you say, voice trembling in the air amid the caress of raindrops against the ceiling, the boom of thunder so close you can taste it in the air. “Really fucking mad.”

The words are too simple for what you feel, the complicated knot of feelings spiralling through your body, from the tips of your toes to your scalp, prickling and uncomfortable and untouchable. 

He nods, looking down at his hands, fidgeting with his keys. “Yeah,” he murmurs quietly. “I’ll, uh—” His shoulder tilts back, head ticking to the side, back toward the front door. “I’ll—”

“You said you had things you wanted to say to me.” 

He pauses and meets your eyes again, gaze sweeping from the floor to your face. “I do.” He answers, expression morphing into something that is so pleading, mournful, desperate, it makes your breath catch. “Mostly to apologize. Only if you want to hear it, though. I get it, if y’don’t.” 

Your mind goes fuzzy and flat. Those words don’t fit together, don’t quite make sense. Apologize for what? He hadn’t exactly been wrong. You could be angry all you wanted at the way he treated you, it didn’t mean he had been wrong. 

Apologies aren’t something you’re familiar with, either. Things are nearly always your fault, since you were a child everything has always been your fault. 

“Are you going to yell at me?” 

Joel breathes out suddenly and hard, like you landed a blow between his ribs, wriggled your fingers between his ribs to flatten your palm against his heart and push. “No, Cher, I. . .No.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to. . . I don’t want to hear all that again.”

“I swear.” 

His swearing doesn’t mean very much at that moment, or, maybe it does. He’d broken promises and kept them. He probably thinks the same of you. 

You don’t want him to leave. 

“I don’t want you to leave.” 

The words lurch out of your mouth, tugged by an invisible hand. True, but you wish their truth didn’t sound so desperate. 

“I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” he says, shoulders relaxing a fraction. His hand uncurls and you can see the red imprint of his keys against his palm. “If you don’t want me to.” 

“I don’t want you to, but I need to lie down,” you murmur and turn away, His broadshadow fits into the doorway as you tug the sheets into a more respectable shape and lie down, still in your jeans and t-shirt from the day before, reeking of sweat and liquor and the sterile press of hospital disinfectant, clutching a pillow to your chest like a child. 

You wish he wasn’t seeing you this way, vulnerable in a way that is unfamiliar to you, that hurts and itches and makes you feel impossibly small and forgettable.    

It’s pathetic that you want him near, that you crave the warm presence of him next to you, a beacon and a shield all in one, when he was the one who’d so thoroughly broken your heart. 

Joel sits on the other side of your bed when you pat the space with your hand, carefully balancing at the edge to give you as much space as possible, to be as unobtrusive and unintrusive as he can. 

It hurts something deep in your heart to see his leg stretched down your mattress, his socked foot by your pink throw blanket at the end of the bed. There’s an intimacy in it that you can’t explain and you have to turn on your other side so your back is facing him, eyes clenched shut against his presence and the headache still pounding in your ears. 

There’s a gulf between you, a stretch of space that had once not existed, that had once been less complicated. 

You struggle to keep your eyes open and succumb to the inevitable, falling asleep next to Joel in day old clothes, filthy and wounded, but safe with the sound of his breathing in your ears. 

.

.

.

Joel doesn’t mean to drift off.

He means to sit vigilant and patient until you wake, until you decide if you want to hear what he has to say. Once you can think clearly, he doesn’t think that you will. He doesn’t think you’ll want him there at all. 

But he’d wanted to make sure you were all right, that you made it home safely. Everything else came at a bonus, at a price. 

Sleep comes anyway, dragging him down, curling swift and hungry around his mind.

It’s peaceful, as it hasn’t been in weeks, the soft, slow tilt of your breathing next to him, the thick press of your scent around him, curling through his ribs, crawling right into his lungs. The room is warm, the rain a quiet white noise that drowns out the rest of the world, occasionally racked apart by thunder. 

You might not want to hear anything he has to say when you have a clear mind, and he has to be okay with that. He has this, for now, you close by and safe, the possibility of apology.

When he wakes, hours have passed, the tilt of the weak, rain-soaked sun tells him it's probably afternoon now. 

Your apartment is warm, almost hot, though when he labors to his feet, he finds the AC unit set to the lowest temperature, moisture gathering along the sill of the window. He finds a cloth to wipe up the damp and then sets about looking for tools, which he doesn't find.

He feels lumbering and large in your space, which he knows from brief flashes on videocalls. He knows the spot behind your couch that looks like mold but isn’t, the Norway shaped water stain on your ceiling, your blue and pink bathroom with cracked tiles and a leaky faucet. He knows the shape of your couch and the shade of the sturdy wooden coffee table and the pale blue walls and each creek of the floorboards. 

The place is now strewn with moving boxes, too, sides stamped with a moving company’s label. He forces down the curiosity and anxiety that they inspire, that you accepted a place at a different program, that you’re moving further away than somewhere within this town. 

It’s a fairly rundown apartment in a building that isn’t maintained in a seedier part of town, far away from the campus and corner grocery stores and well lit public parks. 

But you’ve made it your own. It’s cozy—an eclectic mix of furniture and decorations that somehow work together, that you’ve somehow managed to make look chic and comfortable and like yourself. He imagines you trawling through bargain bins, prowling though stuffy estate sales, making something for yourself, clawing, kicking and screaming, for this too. Just to have somewhere comfortable and yours to lie your head. 

He doesn’t want to go poking around draws and cabinets without your knowledge so he decides to weather the rain and grab the spare toolbox he keeps under the seat in his truck.

Joel wakes you carefully before he goes; the rain still patters down, and only a bit more gently, as he does. 

You’re bleary eyed when you look at him, exhaustion pocketing around your eyes. You look as tired as he feels and the guilt doubles, chokes him. 

“It’s broken,”you murmur when he asks you about the AC. “Sorry.” 

“No, I’m gonna fix it. I’ll be right back. Ain’t going nowhere.” 

A soft shaking of your head, further nestling into the sheets, like everything is normal, like nothing changed or everything changed. “Don’t bother.” Eyes fluttering closed, pulling open suddenly as you try to stay awake. “Movin’.” 

The oft unheard pull of an accent you never let through warms the word in your mouth,  a fresh laid egg. 

Well, good, he thinks. He’d like to hear it more, though that might be out of the question once you’ve had your say. He doesn’t expect you to forgive or forget and isn’t sure he wants you to. 

“I want to.” He touches your cheek and you lean into it a little, the soft press of supple flesh against his fingers.  “You feelin’ okay?” 

You nod, but you’re gone again in a second, sleeping again. 

So he strokes your cheek and takes your keys and gets his tools, rain soaking through his shirt and jeans in seconds. He fixes your air conditioner, and then a loose floorboard because he doesn’t know what to do with himself and every choice seems wrong. Leaving seems wrong, even if you might hope he does while you’re out, sitting beside you in bed looking at the white lace bra hanging over the side of one jammed shut drawer feels wrong, sitting on your couch and staring at the wall, turning your TV on, feels wrong.  

He feels dumb and useless and in the way of himself.

So, after he fixes the leaking faucet in the bathroom, he tightens the hinges on your kitchen cabinets and adjusts the front door on its frame so it closes easier and locks more smoothly, he finds himself among things of you, vintage plates and bowls and bottle green glassware, a thrifted jug saddled with a bushel of flowers and another with assorted, beaten up wooden spoons and bent spatulas. 

The rain finally begins to abate and slow to a trickle. 

You’re still asleep, dead to the world, though now the blanket is tucked up beneath your chin with the air conditioner finally doing its job. 

He thinks of breakfast next, or, lunch, as the day darts and drags by in turn. 

Joel is awful at cooking and always has been, though he’d look to anything to expel the restless energy snapping beneath his skin and there’s only so many things he can find to fix without invading your privacy. 

The kitchen seems like a safe place but there he’s faced with a previously unknown image of you. The counters are clear and clean, another little jug of flowers near the window where the blinds are folded closed, casting weak gray light against the hexagonal tile on the floor. 

Particleboard cabinets scrubbed and pristine, silver coated hardware glinting. 

Like the rest of your place, the walls may be cracked and the materials cheap, but you haven’t let a damn thing slide into decay, a silent push for better, more than this.  

Joel picks through the ingredients and spices you have on hand, mostly cheap food—ramen and cans of soup and frozen bags of vegetables and various kinds of potato, an indulgent pint of that ice cream you like, chocolate with chunks of cherry in it. In the cabinet, he finds a rack after rack of spices, a bag of half-off store brand flour with the orange sale sticker still pressed into the side, little packets of yeast, a little sugar, cooking oil. 

So, you were a baker, maybe, more than a cook. 

The domestic picture it paints makes an ache twinge in his chest, a thirsty tearing that leaks acid into his belly, a reminder of how much he doesn’t know about you, beyond the scope of what he’s been able to know, what carefully calculated things you’ve let him know. 

You’d kept your cards pressed so close to your chest with him, it sometimes felt like you were suffocating yourself, and, maybe, you’d had good reason to. Look at the mess he’d made of the little trust you’d placed in his hands.

He decides against defiling your pristine kitchen, and pulls out his phone to see what the neighborhood has on offer. 

.

.

.

The room is blissfully cold when you wake hours later. 

Your body feels heavy and weak but you drag yourself up because Joel is no longer next to you. Watery blue light filters through your blinds, casting the room in cool tones that match the twinge of pain in your heart. Evening is encroaching and guilt for spending the day in bed immediately wracks you. 

You stand on shaky legs, wobbly but without a headache, thirsty and hungry and wondering what you took. You’re smarter than this, than taking something random from a person you didn’t know. Anything could have happened, lucky that Matt was a nice guy, that nothing so unsavory had happened as to risk all you’d worked for. 

The scent of food penetrates the apartment, between the miracle of stirring, cool air. You press your hand against the unit’s vent for so long your fingers come away icy, amazed that its working. 

After changing and brushing your teeth and washing your face, you find an immediate answer to the question of how the ACsuddenly started working sitting by your front door in the form of a familiar tool box. 

Joel is in your kitchen, standing at your scratched formica countertops, broad shoulders straining at his damp dark blue t-shirt, thick muscle twisting in his biceps as he arranges something you can’t see. It’s odd to see him there, odd to be looking at him again at all, threads of complicated emotion tangling in your chest, a cancerous mass that isn’t just unravelable, but fused together. 

Grateful and anxious and embarrassed for being grateful, shame and affection and need. Worst of all, uncertain love, the spindly, pulsing pain of knowing you missed him terribly and that he likely hadn’t thought of you at all. 

The embarrassment and shame fold in on themselves, greedily plucking at your tendons and bones, biting meat straight off the bone, that he is seeing where you live, how you live, your hand-me-downs and thrift store finds, the poverty that he knows about but hasn’t really seen. 

You peer around him as you pad closer. The familiar scent of him calms the uneven pace of your heart, and you hate that it does. He smells like cigarette smoke, like sweat, like something so specifically Joel. You wonder if he took up smoking again and feel another brief flash of guilt. 

Everything in the world seems to be your fault at that moment.

“Did you cook?” 

He startles and turns, eyes finding yours. “I’m a god awful cook,” he admits after a moment of examining you. “It’s from that place down the road.” 

To-go breakfast, saddled on pretty plates for fifty cents each from a thrift store, ringing floral designs. Huevos rancheros, still steaming hot.

It’s weird to have someone in your apartment, to have anyone there, but especially Joel. It’s always been just you, the secret, rough parts of your life hidden from everyone around you. Not that there are many people to count. You have no friends, have only recently connected with your colleagues who you would not have invited over anyway, and, your parents who might not balk at the state of the building, but have never visited, never even asked for pictures of your place or a description over the phone.

But Joel knows everything, has seen every dark corner of your life, knows the worst parts of it. 

And now he knows where you live. 

And now he knows your name. 

The breadth of the power he wields over you, could wield over you, catches in your lungs. Maybe that’s what he’s come here to say, that there’s something you still owe or he’ll ruin your life. 

The seal of silence reasserts itself between you as Joel sets the plates on the kitchen table tucked into the corner beneath the front window, followed by cups of coffee and a glass of water pointedly sat only next to your plate. 

You watch him warily, feeling distinctly uncomfortable, like it's his kitchen and not yours, like you should get on your knees and serve him, beg him for the ways to make it all right again. 

You normally eat on the couch, hunched over a plate balanced on one of the throw pillows as you watch reruns of comfort tv shows. You aren’t sure you’ve ever used the kitchen table for anything other than studying, rolling out sticky bread dough, and tossing your mail and keys.

He’d wanted to talk to you and now he’s quiet, a frenetic, kinetic energy radiating at you as you stare at him and don’t sit down. 

Foil-like anxiety wraps around your heart, pinches in at the stiff corners, squeezes and folds awkwardly until you can’t breathe.

He still doesn’t say anything, something sour and pressing worming its way into the back of your throat, half formed fears stacking up in your mind. All the things he knows, the pictures he has, the ways he can hurt you, how much stronger he is than you. 

Joel feels tricked by you, that much became clear upon reflection of that fateful afternoon, the accusations he’d thrown at you like damnable stones. You had crossed some invisible line, traversed over an unspoken part of your agreement that made him need the relationship to be real. 

Then, you’d screamed at him in public, probably embarrassed him, and now you’re here, alone, vulnerable. 

Desperate men who feel scorned and humiliated acted in unusually violent ways, that is a simple fact that has ground your nose into the carpet more than once. It’s the reason you bend over backward to avoid it, breaking yourself on the shores of their fragile self-importance. 

Joel has never been violent with you but you begin to calculate all the ways he could hurt you, like a compulsion you can’t kick, even with him. The plates and mugs are ceramic and easily thrown, the table is solid wood, the kitchen floors are hard tile. There’s the edge of the countertop to consider and the metal catch of the cabinets to consider. 

Despite the apartment’s shortcomings you’ve never felt afraid there, not even when the downstairs neighbors had fought, slamming things into the thin walls and threatening to maim each other for hours at a time. 

You’d called the police once when the woman began wailing after a particularly loud thump. 

No one would do the same for you, that much you’re certain of. This is a place of averted, blind eyes and minding one’s own business, if you knew what was good for you. There’s no air in your lungs to scream, anyway.

The silence in the space between the hum of the AC unit he fixed is so thick and cloying it chokes you. 

“Eat somethin’,” he requests, voice strained with a tinge of desperation. “You’ll feel better.”

 His voice slices the film off the awkwardness, the silence.  

Maybe there wouldn’t be a huge, dramatic blowout. Maybe the reality of things fell closer to somewhere in between throwing you to the floor and acidic, tense silence. Maybe there’s just this, him and you and the mistakes you each made, the crumpled napkin of your guilt and shame. 

You feel tired again, suddenly, exhausted and wrung out to the bone, like everything that had ever been filled with moisture and collagen and passion has been wiped out, licked clean by hungry tongues. 

And you’re hungry and the food smells good and you’ve never tried that place down the block because it’s one more thing you can’t really afford. You think about sitting down, lifting the fork, and can’t.

With some distant, removed, horror, you start to fucking cry. Because you don’t want him to hurt you and you don’t think he will, because he made sure you got home safely and bought you breakfast and fixed your air conditioner, even though you’re moving out soon and he must know that from all the boxes. 

You aren’t sure what he wants with you, why he’s there and doing kind things like nothing happened, like he didn’t break your heart, like you didn’t betray him somehow, not given him what he wanted. You hadn’t been good enough, somehow. 

You are reminded again, that he doesn’t think you have a heart, that you felt nothing, and you’re still so confused as to why it would bother him if you had felt nothing. 

You mind circles back to that terrible thought, that maybe men just felt entitled to those feelings, the assumption that the woman they fucked would fall in love with them, feel anything other than simple, human pleasure. 

Had all of this, the stupid heartbreak, been because of his ego? 

“Cherry,” he murmurs, arms around you, a warm cocoon that guides you to one of the rough wooden dining chairs, great heaving sobs that seem outside yourself slipping out in torrents and lost words. You hear your own voice, garbled words that even you can’t understand between painful breaths. 

Minutes pass where you feel like you can’t breathe, like the air is too thin and you’re too incompetent to inhale it properly. Joel strokes your back and murmurs things you can’t hear until you begin to feel light headed. “Jesus Christ, darlin’, breathe, you’re gonna make yourself sick.” 

You suck in a deep breath and cough, following the demand easier than you’d like to admit. 

Joel’s face remains a watery mass seen through swollen eyes. You hear the hum of his voice but not the words it's making. 

Eventually, the waterfall abates, the hollowfaced shame returning, the wrung out, empty feeling. 

When you open your eyes again, he’s there in front of you on one knee so your faces are level, steady and unmoving, hand caressing your spine and shoulders through your shirt. 

The warmth is nice and undeserved, tender and soft. You feel dirty in more ways than one, tacky with yesterday’s sweat and the antiseptic smell of the hospital, reminded of being used up and filthy in a way that you will never be able to scrub off your skin or out of your soul. 

How stupid, to be sitting in front of a client crying, and not because he wanted you too. How pathetic to once again feel love lost and never returned like cling film wrap you can’t peel away, melded into your skin like plastic melting into a stovetop.  

“I saw your note,” he says, and for a moment the comment is inexplicable, a mass of confusion pressing against the back of your eyes, against the grooves of your brain. Note? What fucking note? “On the newspaper,” he continues. “Darlin’, I’m real proud of you.” 

His pride should mean nothing but a swell of something sweet blooms in your chest, like fleshy mushroom colonizing your heart. He’s the first to say it. 

You meant for things to be different. You meant to tell him happily, with your own shining pride, not with a note on newspaper you had hoped it wouldn’t find. 

“I wanted to tell you,” you say, voice hoarse and awful. “That day that—” And suddenly everything you wanted to say comes lurching up out of you, even though he doesn’t deserve your honesty, even though you don’t understand what happened to make him so suddenly and violently reject you, even the false parts of you. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, gripping his hands, faintly and dizzily aware that he’s on his knees beside you, hands cradling you. He blanches and opens his mouth and you barrel on before he can speak. “I thought about telling you about my age for a long time, for weeks. I tried to quit you. I was going to end it all so you never had to know I lied. It would have been better, wouldn’t it? I didn’t. . .I knew you’d hate me. And I didn’t want you to hate me. But I-I was going to. Joel, I was going to tell you. Please, I—”

He’s shaking his head and that scares you. You still aren’t getting it right, saying things right. “Joel, please don’t—don’t do that again—I’m so sor—”

“No,” he says sharply. “You ain’t that one that should be apologizin’. You hear me? Cherry? Baby, look at me.” 

You glance up, making the effort to meet his gaze head on. What you see makes your breath catch in your chest. Devastation and guilt and regret so deep you feel it reflected in yourself, mirrored soul for mirrored soul. 

“You listenin’?” You nod. “Okay,” he nods back, soothingly stroking your hands and arms, anywhere he can reach. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Nothin’. I am so fucking sorry. I’m gonna be sorry for the rest of my goddamn miserable life about what happened that afternoon. You ain’t got a thing to apologize for.” 

“I don’t understand, Joel,” you grip him tighter, confusion a thick swirl, like muck obscuring the bottom of a riverbed. “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand what I did.” 

He shakes his head, bowing until his forehead nearly touches your knees. You cup your hands against the back of his head, the soft space at the back of his neck. “Please, I need you to tell me. Just say it.” 

“Cherry,” he murmurs, the scratchy tug of his voice against your skin like the rolling of hills, the restless press of the sea. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I love you, that’s what it really comes down to.” 

The words are like the static, crackling of an exposed wire, electricity over water. A distant part of you that you hold beneath water in your lungs, preens, deliriously happy. “Don’t say that,” you breathe. “No. Please don’t say that.” 

He frowns. “It’s the truth,” he says flatly. “I am. . . fuckin' miserable and I have been for a long time. I’m old, even if you was twenty-seven, I’m still so much goddamn older. I've loved you for a long time, and I needed you to say you. . .” His jaw works, tense, eyes averted. It’s difficult for him, you realize, to say these things, lie them out plainly, and yet he does it anyway. “I needed you to feel the same. I figured you lied. It don’t bother me as much as it should, but I needed you to want what I wanted.” 

It makes hot tears string to the backs of your eyes again, but this time you swallow the anguish that wants to tear from your chest. “What doesn’t?”  

“Baby,” he says softly, “any of it. I was a goddamn fool that day, for all of it. Scared outta my mind.” He folds his other knee down with a soft grunt and it’s somehow worse. You stroke his hair and listen to him recount a conversation with his brother, his worst kept fears dragged kicking and screaming to the forefront of his mind. 

Tommy’s notion that you didn’t feel anything for him aside from grateful for a steady, easy income. A fair assertion, even if it hurts. It had been true with every man but Joel after all, it has been true with him at first, too. Men were sources of money and not much else. 

You aren’t sure what to say to any of it, where to place the information, the revelations revealed to you in lurching sentences and cutoff vowels, many restarted sentences and restated meanings. He seems determined to say what he means, to get it right. 

“I needed it to mean somethin’,” he finishes eventually, voice lurching to a jagged halt. “Because it meant somethin’ to me. I tried. . .Jesus, I tried to feel nothin’. But when I looked at you—you mean. . .damn it all, if you don’t mean everything to me, darlin’.” 

A shard of memory in your throat, stabbing down into your lungs painfully—the pull of his gaze when he met your eyes, his cock already deep inside you, something in his eyes going desperate and needful. 

Oh, Christ, he’d murmured. 

The moment he realized it couldn’t mean nothing, the moment that would make him push you away?

You stroke his cheek, feel the stubble beneath your fingertips. He bows his head, the crown of his skull pressed against your belly. “I needed it to mean something too. And you just. . .” Threads of that morning’s anger return, the way he touched you that day, the things his words implied, the things he had never told you. You feel like you’re making a spectacle of yourself, false feelings and false words. “You threw me away,” you shake your head. “You don’t love me. You can’t.” 

He breathes out hard, like the air is punched from his chest, the curling snake of truth wringing it from his lungs. Some part of you starts to float off, away, the sensation of his hands distant, against someone else’s body. You don’t want to feel anymore, don’t want to be in your body.  “Hey,” he pulls himself up, cups your cheek in one hand. “Stay here with me. Please.” 

The request is discordant, a plea that doesn’t sit right inside you, tearing at the lining of your already shredded heart. His hand squeezes yours tightly. “C’mon back.” After a moment, the feeling returns to your fingers and toes. You fit yourself back between the lines of your body, between the slats of your ribs, gaze focusing on him once again. “There,” he says patiently. “Good.” 

For a long moment, you just look at each other, silence thick and viscous.

“Cher, I think about you all the goddamn time. Every second of my day, I’m thinkin’ about you. And I ain’t thinkin’ about fucking you. I wonder if you ate lunch, how your day is goin’. I worry about you drivin’ to the hotel. I wonder what you wore, if you’re happy, if you miss me like I miss you. If you smell cigarette smoke and think about me. I’m a goddamn lovesick fool—”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Sarah?” 

He blinks hard, but before he can answer you’re pivoting back to you and him, unjustly terrified of what his answer might be. He says he loves you and you aren’t sure you believe it, that you should believe it, but love didn’t mean he wanted to invite you into his life, wanted you to know his family and the tender inner parts of him. 

He thought about you, so what. Lots of men do. 

“I was so happy that day,” you admit. “Really, truly happy. Because aside from graduating and being offered the doctoral spot, it also came with credit waivers and a larger stipend.”

He appears momentarily shocked, that this moment has turned to a confessional of sorts. “The money don’t matter to me—” 

“But it matters to me. It matters that I’m able to take care of myself. And if I was going to tell you how I felt, I needed that security because otherwise I would feel like your—” You don’t want to say the word whore, afraid it will remind him of what you are. “Like we never moved past the. . .the sugarbaby thing, and then it wouldn’t be real. And I wanted it to be real. I didn’t want you to think what your brother thinks. That I only cared about your wallet. Because I love you, too.” 

“All right,” he murmurs, soothingly like you’re a wild animal, not lingering on the admission. “Okay. I understand. I hear you.” 

You shake your head, feel tears brewing hot and steady again. “Do you?”  

“Do you hear me?” 

You feel raw and shaky but you think you do. “Yes.” 

“Do you believe me?”

“I want to.” 

He nods and lumbers to his feet and for one singularly horrible moment, you think it's not enough, that he’s going to walk to the front door and slam it behind him. But he grabs the other chair by its spindly back and drags it closer to you. “Please eat somethin’.” 

The food still holds a little warmth, growing cooler as you eat and drink.

Some of the acridity of fear and anxiety fades. 

Joel said he loves you, and though you’re not sure you believe it, you believe that he seems to believe it, and for the moment, that’s enough. 

.

.

.

“You can look.” 

Joel’s gaze careens hard into yours, stern but velvet wrapped. 

You’re standing in the doorway of your bathroom, hot water streaming in billowing waves of steam from the faucet and into the bathtub behind you. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.” 

But this is different and you know it. You aren’t sure why you’re forcing it, why you want to strip out of your clothes in front of him, for him. Putting yourself on offer, so he knows. He can take it all back, take your body and leave all the rest, the complicated jagged painful edges, behind. 

“This is different,” he says, echoing your thoughts, brows lowering over his eyes, head ticking slightly to the side. The room is bluish now, with the fading of the sun, the slowly retreating rain. He says your given name quietly, a plea and a reminder. “You know it is.” A soft request that you believe it's different, too. 

“What if I want you to look?” 

“Do you want me to look?” 

You aren’t really sure, but in answer you pull your shirt over your head, letting it drop to the floor. You’re not sure what happened to your bra, probably still on the floor of that frat house bedroom, hooked over some guy’s lampshade like a trophy he didn’t earn. 

Joel doesn’t look away, standing amid the sea of moving boxes littering your living room floor. You turn your back and feel the heat of his gaze on your spine, crackling along your skin like long remembered, long lost touch. You slip out of your jeans, tug your underwear off and leave everything in a little pile where it lands. 

You sense more than hear him follow you into the bathroom, hand on your elbow warm and not a surprise, helping you lower yourself into the bathtub. 

He picks up your clothes from the floor and sticks them in the hamper. “Where you keep spare sheets?” 

“Bedroom closet.” 

Seemingly on some kind of mission, determined to prove himself to you or to himself, you listen to him rattle around your apartment, dipping back in to pass off another glass of water, the command to drink on his lips. The nurse had said rest and fluids and so you down it all at once and settle back in the hot water, washing away grim and stickiness like an oily film over your skin. The soaped water smells like citrus and it reminds you of summer, of the hotel pool and Joel’s skin against yours in the sun. 

You wonder if Joel is doing chores out of obligation or guilt or need to be useful or just because he doesn’t want to look at you naked.

Do you want him to look at you? If he came back and pulled you out of the water and said he needed you, would you want to give in? Would you give in anyway? 

Heat lopes lazily into your belly, desire that you haven’t felt into weeks pairing your skin apart, flesh from bone. The memory of his body against yours, the heavy full feeling of his cock inside you makes you squeeze your thighs together, makes you want to slip your hand between your thighs.

But you push the feeling down and instead soap your skin and listen to the rain and the new crackle of thunder and the domestic sounds of Joel stripping the sheets off your bed, making it up again, starting a load of laundry, reminded suddenly that none of this is new to him. 

He’d been a father and husband for decades and years, and a good one at that, from all that you can tell. It’s both instinct and automatic and you so badly don’t want to lose him that you start crying again. 

Young and hopeful and circularly stupid for being so hopeful. 

Love, he said he loves you. But love doesn’t erase embarrassment and shame. 

You love each other, and what if that’s not enough, what if the canyon of age and experience and mistakes is too deep and wide? 

Do you want to forgive him? Can you forgive the way he treated you? You understand it at least, even that, as so many things, had been motivated by love and avoidance and fear. Those are things you can understand at least, and maybe that’s all that is necessary. 

Forgiven or not, love or not, he remains yours. 

Joel doesn’t ask why you’re crying when he returns, just lowers himself to his knees next to the tub with a grunt and takes your face in his hands and strokes your cheeks. “You’re all right,” he says gently, a fissure of something shaken and broken behind the softness. “You’re all right, Cher.” 

You tug your face away and swipe at the tears, wrapping your arms around your knees, pressing your cheek to the crest of them instead. “Do you like my bathroom?” You ask in a croak. “I did the little crystals,” you nod at the hardware on the cabinets and drawers. “They were gold before.” 

His mouth twitches and you tangle your wet fingers with one of his. “Mhm. Nice to finally see it. Better’n on that damn phone.” He touches your face again, fingers sliding behind your ear softly, pressing against the tender tissue there. “I like your apartment.” 

You roll your eyes, feeling raw and vulnerable as he strokes your wet cheek with his thumb.

“I mean it,” he answers. “Building is a shithole, but you made it nice.” 

“Really?” 

“Mhm. You know, I didn’t grow up with money. I know what it’s like to do your best with what you got. You done a good job, with everything. I am real proud of you. No matter what.”

Swollen satisfaction loops through your waterlogged heart, deflated almost instantly by reality.  

Look what you lost to get it, you think. Sold yourself, probably ruined something inside you irreparably, let yourself be taken care of by a man. There’s still a niggling worry, expressed so long ago now that you wonder if Joel would remember it, that having any help would take away your accomplishments, make them someone else’s to dangle like a sword over your bent head. 

Things will always be uneven between you. He’s older and monied and experienced. And while you’re old in a different way, in lessons but not years, you don’t quite measure up. Without Joel, you might not have made it through. He curled your worries in the center of his fist and didn’t let them get to you, ever steady and present and giving. He’s never been withholding, demanding one thing in service of another. An extra hundred bucks if you performed x, if you did y. 

He never told you how to dress or speak, never demanded you behave a certain way. Even within the complicated tangle of your dynamic, there had been freedom to choose, to leave, to be yourself when your self was something you tried to suppress and hide. 

You tilt against the rim of the bathtub and let him hold you half against his chest. The angle must be uncomfortable for him, but he doesn’t move, stroking the back of your neck, the wing of your shoulder, the top of your spine. 

But he’d hurt you too, left you, and how could you know it wouldn’t happen again? If you pursued this, would you always feel interior, like you were playing dress up in his life? This would be an ongoing issue, you would face scrutiny from everyone about your age, about your relationship. He says he loves you, but for how long would that matter? 

“Y’know,” he says against your forehead, like he can trace the lines of your thoughts, as though they run through a skull so transparent to him you may as well be soft putty in his hands. “I told Ellie about you.”

Something hard catches in the back of your throat, exactly the kind of thing you need to hear at the right moment, floundering new questions in its wake. 

Surely she must think terrible things about you. If your father dated a girl around your age, what would you think of her?

Probably that she was a victim. 

But Joel is nothing like your father, the reluctant nagging accusation of daddy issues laughing from the back of your mind. 

“You did?” You ask softly, tucking your head heavily against his bicep. The muscle flexes beneath your cheek, taut and strong. You look into his face, so close together, his breath fans across your lips, the wiry bristled hair of his beard brushing your chin and cheek. “What did she say?” 

He sighs, breath ghosting across your forehead as he adjusts his body. You hear something crack and pop, feel the feathering of his hair against your skin. Then he laughs, self-deprecating. “Said I was a miserable old man and an idiot, and she was right.” You close your eyes, to better memorize the feeling of him touching you, talking to you like you’re the only person in the world. “I’d like you to meet her sometime,” he continues carefully. “If that’s somethin’, uh, on the table. Eventually.” 

You blink and meet his eyes, searching his gaze for falsehoods and false gods. But you find yourself reflected deep in the pools of his eyes, swimming amongst the warmth you’ve come to love. “And Sarah,” he says slowly. “I don’t know how you, uh, found out. I never. . .It’s still hard for me to talk about her. It wasn’t keepin’ it from you.” He pauses for a long moment, then says, “She’s my baby.” 

That’s enough, all you need to know. 

It wasn’t about you; she’s his baby. 

Scabby, picked over thoughts, reopen and weep, your heart squeezed inside too small a space.

He holds you there in the water as it cools from hot to warm, the teasing steam evaporating as you doze in the water and feel the slippery press of his hands over you. 

“I don’t know if I want to forgive you,” you murmur. You don’t know if you can, the pure, thick glass of truth you held between you for so long is broken at your feet. 

Broken, but not shattered. The pieces are big enough to fit smoothly together again, if you worked at it, if you were patient.

He smells like cigarettes and leather, and the homey, comforting familiarity of bergamot and wood shavings. 

“I know,” he answers, still stroking your naked skin. “I know.”

“But I love you,” you admit softly. “So it might not matter.”

His throat works, jaw tense and clenching. “I love you, Cherry.” 

You reach up and press your hand against his cheek, tilting his head toward you, following your touch like a dog at heel. You kiss him and feel the loosening of his jaw against your hand. It feels significant, like coming home and being seen and missed. It sparks and stokes the desire again, the neediness that hid in your bones. 

When you take his hand in yours and guide it between your legs, he stiffens and doesn’t let you move his fingers any further beneath the water than the middle of your belly. “You sure?” 

“Yes.” 

Before, you might have teasingly offered something in return. I promise I’ll suck your cock later. 

Now, you blink at him and try something more vulnerable, more truthful. You want and it’s okay that you do. “I missed you.” 

“Yeah,” he murmurs, sliding his hand down, your fingers still curled around his thick wrist. He touches your cunt and the water swells and shallows with the buck of your hips, desperate and sensitive. 

He parts your folds, the water cool against the inside of your parting thighs, the shell of your pussy. You feel split and peeled open, an orange without its rind, locked inside the lightning synapses of your own body, needy for him and no one else. 

He teases you for only a moment, his fingers finding your clit and circling it gently, carefully, in the way he knows you like because he has memorized things about you that you were sure no one in the world cared to know. 

Joel knows and cares, is careful and knowing of you. His mouth finds yours when he pushes a finger into you, kissing you softly and then with the possessive snap of teeth around a rabbit’s neck. The time apart from Joel has been the longest you’ve gone without sex, without something inside you in two years and the readjustment almost feels like being brand new again.

He eases you into it, into taking another finger and then a third, fucking you gently and then harder when your nails dig into his forearm, seeking out the soft, spongy part of you that you’re unable to reach yourself, thumb against your clit, massaging until you come, damp throat bared when you tilt your head back and fold into his touch. He talks to you, words curling and lost, but gentle like a breeze pointing you in the right direction, saying look right here, I got you. 

Waves of pleasure that spiral and loop back around, several orgasms or maybe one long wavering one, you aren’t sure. 

What you are sure of is Joel’s body against yours, his voice in your ear.

I love yous and I’m sorrys and I will say it every day for the rest of my life if you let me and even if you don’t and can’t hear me.  

.

.

.

Sometime later he urges you out of the cold water, wrapping a towel around your still shaking, post-bliss body carefully, urging you next door into your bedroom and beneath clean, cool sheets, still naked but clean and dry. 

“Are you leaving?” You ask when he heads back toward the door, the panic so obvious in your voice it makes you cringe. 

“Gonna shower, that’s it,” he assures, hands already on his belt, slipping it out of the loops of his jeans, like he wants it to be done with it already so he can come back to you sooner. “Just rest. I’ll be back in a minute.” 

You don’t rest. 

You listen to the shower turn on and the spray hit the wall, and worry about Joel seeing the cracks in the tiles and the cracks in you and leaving again.  

But you must drift off because the next thing you know, he’s there wrapped around you, warm and solid and strong in your dark bedroom. You can feel his chest hair against your back, the tight cross of his arms across your belly.

You are curled together like crescent moons, cradled in the curve of his muscled, soft body, the low sound of his breathing against yours, deep and even and calm. His naked skin against yours feels significant. There's nothing between you now but something new and the chance to build it right this time. 

The night cocoons you together and for the moment, for the first time in your life, you feel like you are enough, like this is enough, like you deserve to rest your head. 

When you wake in the morning, you know he'll still be there, and a different kind of Sunday will dawn, for better or worse.

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

[dreamtofus]

SO GOODDD OMG

of my own name

pairing: joel miller x former f!sex worker!reader

wc: 9k

summary: Joel doesn't cope well without you.

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), male masturbation, trouble with/painful orgasming, fantasized/dreamed sex acts (m!receiving oral), mentions of sex work, ptsd, self deprecation, big huge guilt and shame, emotional vulnerability, mentions of death and car accidents, panic and anxiety, depression, regret, losing dogs and pathetic old man core

a/n: as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading! I'm sorry for what I've done to that man, all will be fixed in time <3

Your birthday passes in a fleeting haze of could have beens, should have beens. 

Joel thinks about you the whole day, what you’re doing, who you’re spending it with. If your arrangement hadn’t ended, would you have spent your birthday with him? 

A gift, wrapped and tucked away in the glove compartment of his truck for weeks, plans to pick up a cake and a pint of cherry and chocolate icecream with the chunks in, because that was your favorite. Something quiet, something that said he knows you and cares about you. 

It’s only right that he return the sentiment, anyway, after you’d made a fuss about his birthday, made him feel not so old and jaded and dirty. 

Joel hadn’t meant for things to go the way they had at the hotel. 

He’d meant to talk to you, to tilt your chin up and tell you he knew that you lied about your age and it was okay and that he wasn’t mad, but there were things that needed clearing up.

The empty hotel room seemed to laugh, an omen of the future he would have to endure, something lonely and without you, the horrifying realization dawning that he didn’t want to have to endure it without you. 

Teasingly bright sunshine had streamed through the window, the sky a perfect square of robin’s egg blue from his place on the bed, his thoughts an ever worsening storm, a turbulent sea of gnawing worry that his brother was right and he’d been blind, caught up in whatever it is he thinks he felt with you. 

He’d arrived too early, given himself too much time to think, for Tommy’s words and accusations to spiral into webs of truth, into questions about what the fuck he thought he was doing, who he was kidding. 

By the time you got there, the only thing he could hear were things he didn’t want to believe were true, that he’d deluded himself into believing weren’t true for long enough. 

Still, he had not meant to jump you and fuck you like you didn’t matter. Like he didn’t know you. 

But some part of him had needed to prove it to himself that it was fine, that Tommy had it wrong. Tommy couldn’t be right, this whole thing couldn’t sting like a wound dipped in alcohol and salt, if the feelings weren’t real in the first place. If it was just sex and nothing more for him, as it surely was for you. 

The excitement in your eyes when you pushed the door open had ached, like looking into the sun, burning out his corneas. So pretty in a white t-shirt and spring green skirt. So pretty and happy and thrilled to see him.

Clothes you felt comfortable enough to wear in front of him, clothes that were yours and not a persona you pulled on. The club clothes had been discarded months ago, tiny skirts and tight tops that you never seemed yourself in. 

I want to—there’s something we—

He’d hated every fucking moment of it, the way he treated you, the way you knew something was wrong and remained gentle and careful when he did not deserve it. The way he couldn’t look at you, spread so thin he felt like a live wire, an exposed nerve. 

And it hadn’t happened. 

As soon as he met your eyes, the realization that the only thing he felt, or wanted to feel, was love and affection, not lust. He was left with the simmering, roiling knowledge that this was real to him and he needed to know it was real for you too, that the things he suspected you felt weren’t a delusion. 

But it hadn’t come out that way, the words had fallen harsh and accusatory, the implication behind them not what he intended. 

Words tumbling out of his mouth like so much misplaced debris, the crumbling of a mountainside, red rock tumbling down into a turbulent sea, hasher than he intended, more final than he wanted, desperate for you to hear, to turn and say it was all real, Joel, all of it. 

You’d given in so easily, laid down and bared your throat. 

Regret, shame, thick and sticking, as he watched the light behind your eyes flicker and fade, replaced by a blankness that felt foreign and wrong. 

The rush of clarity that had slammed into the moment you lurched up from the bed and shuffled across the room, arching around him like you expected him to reach out and hit you, had felt like coming up for a breath of air from the murky bottom of a silted riverbed. And then you had been too far gone to reel back, unhearing and locked away inside your own mind. 

He’d needed you to deny what he accused you of, to scoff and say it wasn’t true, that his feelings weren’t that of a delusional old man chasing the skirt of a much younger woman that felt nothing for him. He’d needed you to say you felt something too. 

But all you’d said was okay. 

It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be. 

You weren’t denying it, you were never going to deny it, and it wasn’t your fault but it was his for allowing things to go on for this long, for letting himself believe you could continue in that bubble, that you’d ever return the feelings hardening into a thick crust on his soul.

The wet tripping of his heart, poorly spun sugar, breaking in all the wrong places. You were turning twenty-four, even worse than your proffered twenty-nine, and denying nothing, telling him nothing about how you really felt, if you felt anything at all. 

Worse, saying he was right. 

You’re right. It wasn’t fucking real. I’m a whore, Joel. 

It was only when the door closed and your quick footsteps faded down the plush carpeted hallway that it had sunk in what he’d just done, that it could probably never be fixed, that you’d once again held him at arms length with that word. 

How many times have you said it, like a talisman, like a warding, like a denial. 

I’m just a whore. 

.

.

.

Joel doesn’t think about you. 

Or, he tries not to. 

He manages it well enough.

Or, he thinks he does. 

He does.

He tells himself that he manages it. 

It’s a lie that doesn’t stick, not even in his own mind. And he’s always been a poor fucking liar. 

It’s fine, even if there’s a stitch in his chest so painful it actually stops him in his tracks, makes him worry he might actually be at risk of a fucking heart attack. He’s the right goddamn age for it. 

Ellie makes him go to the clinic and get checked out, worried he really is having heart issues, but he’s as healthy as a horse and even she can’t deny that when the bloodwork is sent over. She pours over it at his kitchen table, glaring at him like he fabricated it. She knows something’s off and can’t figure what. 

He’s glad she doesn’t know. There’s only so much disappointment and disbelief he can handle. 

You loom like a wraith in the back of his mind, fanged and clawed, striking with lightning quick reflexes when he least expects it, when he thinks he’s just managed to push you out of his consciousness. 

But he’s been through this before, had endured the same kind of grueling torture from his memory, the open wound in his chest, when Ellie wasn’t speaking to him, when Sarah and Tess died. A fissure that opened when he was forced to watch, helpless, as Tess grieved her son, a little boy he’d helped take care of for only a couple of years. 

But he can’t unsee the betrayal in your eyes, the pleading desperation that he’d ignored. He should have said it differently, given you more time to explain, to say something, instead of jumping down your throat. 

Jesus, telling you you should end things before you’d even had a chance to speak. Protecting himself, cutting you down in the process.  

The days take on a relentless kind of monotony. 

He rises early because his sleep is barbed with flashes of you—wide, accusing eyes staring out from a dark horizon; the faded, sepia afterimage of you sitting on that familiar hotel room bed imprinted on the inside of his eyelids; cracks of anxiety and shame and humiliation and, somewhere in your features, disbelief, runneling over your face, before it whipped away. 

In its wake, something much worse had emerged, risen from the depths of you to drape over your eyes like the blinded gaze of an ever tilting scale of justice. Out of his favor, out of his life. Blank and unseeing, far away inside your own body.

And him, standing there, unable to stop himself, unable to pull you back. Clawing desperation as you tugged on your shirt and skirted around him like he might reach out and-

Guilt and regret rise like twin snakes from dead wheat, fangs hitched into his heart with such venom he can't breathe, that ignoring the feeling only doubles it.

So, he gets up before the sun, difficult these days, when the sun rises earlier each day, makes coffee and sees the smiling curl of your lips around a milkshake straw, curries the horses and is faced with the caressing, soft memory of you there, kissing him against the wall of the stable, the overlay of you riding Whiskey in a tight circle around the paddock in that teasingly funny hat and belt buckle, skin shining in the warm sun at the small of your back, joyful and young and at peace.

Happy.

He'd made you happy, once.

You’re there in all the empty places in his life, cavities that had slowly been filled by something ambrosial, healing and satisfying. All ripped away by his shameful fucking fear, his animal desperation to be loved.

It's fucking pathetic, it's inexcusable, and even seeing your ghost feels invasive and perverse and damnable.

The ranch turns verdant as the days mosey past, slow but not sweet, like bitter tar instead of molasses. 

Spring encroaches on the world in leaps and bounds, trees shrugging on green thatches like patched, loved coats. A continually invasive thought occurs to him, that he’d like to bring you back out to the ranch so you can see it at its best, only to remember there is no you, not anymore, not to him.

The first week is hard enough, the haunting lure of memory like a hooked fish, a silvery, taunting dart that won’t reel to shore. The crease and fold of your face, the tearing pain in his chest when your expression went vacant and far away and unfamiliar, how his gentle coaxing tone could not bring you out of it, the last lash of your voice like a poorly healed scar. 

But the first Friday is unbearable. 

It’s agony. 

He tells himself you wouldn’t go back to the club to work, that you don’t need to. 

He’s been paying your rent for a few months, and you’re smart and frugal and constantly worried about money, so he knows you saved it. The payment is automatic, but this month the funds are never accepted or rejected, just left there in the limbo of cyberspace. 

You’d gotten comfortable with using his card for a few frivolous purchases, too, among the transactions for groceries and to-go cups of coffee, so you hadn’t been spending what you saved in rent on something else. 

The card is now silent and still as a tomb. He’d hoped to see some kind of revenge purchase, something ungodly expensive just to know you were real, that you were still there on the other side of it. He’ll gladly swallow your anger, if it means he knows something of how you are. 

But you remain firmly silent, encased in glass ice, and that’s worse. The indifference to the end, the earth shattering silence, is worse. 

None of it had meant a goddamn thing, and he’s still sorry for it. Still sorry for the look in your eyes, for the secrets you pressed so carefully against the tips of his fingers and the seam of his mouth. Because even if you didn’t feel anything for him, there are some things he knows are real. Your neighbor's horse, your shitty parents, how important school is to you, the issues with your advisor.

He can’t expel the notion that you might return to the club, that he might have severely misjudged your situation, that nothing he’d given you had ever been enough. The thought makes his stomach turn and before he can really help it, he’s pulled on his boots and climbed into his truck. The drive is shorter and longer than he remembers. 

Your ghost watches him from the passenger seat, stiff with carefully concealed tension, relaxing gradually against the door, pawing through his daughters’ cassette tapes, tilting your face into the breeze, humming along softly to the radio, lifting your shirt to flash him with genuine laughter on your lips, sliding across the seat to lean your head on his shoulder, ask where he’s taking you. 

The club is as loud and awful as he remembers, red pulsing light, the scent of cheap plastic and sweat and liquor, too loud music and the uncomfortable press and swell of bodies warm and damp around him. Flashes of naked flesh, the strings of thongs, hungry, demanding hands, teeth shining in the dark, mouths offered another drink. 

There are a couple new girls that he doesn’t recognize, sitting in the laps of men, caressing flabby cheeks and wrinkled skin, giggling too loudly, eyes dilated and far away, skinny ankles kicking together. Pushing their chests out, aching their backs, something you did often when he first met you. 

Is that what he’d looked like with you? Dirty, seeking fingers tucked beneath your skirt as your eyes went blank and irritated? Is that what your elastic, soft skin looked like pressed against his? 

He turns his gaze toward the bar, the memory of you sitting there, eyes meeting his above the sea of heads bent over too warm beer, lip caught between your teeth, lashes fluttering against your cheeks. The fractured slice of a memorialized you beckoning him closer with a flick of your eyes.

This time, you turn away, lean closer into the mirage of the man next to you, hand between your legs, inside your shirt, slapping and squeezing your ass. 

Joel blinks and the memory disappears like so much dust in the wind, red dirt against a sinking Texas sun. 

He’d wanted to break that man’s hand, send him sprawling to the ground, for touching you, for touching you like that, like you were meat. The only thing that had stopped him, had been your stilling hand on his arm, telling him that was just part of it. 

It had made a protective film layer over his growing affection for you. 

He looks for you, the real you, but you aren’t there.

You aren’t at the club, at least. It’s possible you left with someone else, and the thought of you enduring that again makes his chest go tight. 

“Well, well, look who it is! Cherry’s Joel.” 

Chastity appears next to him, pretty blonde hair knotted into a ponytail at the top of her head. “She here? Cherry?” he asks, trying not to sound desperate and probably failing. “Or around? Leave with somebody else?” 

Joel isn’t sure what he plans to do if you are working, if you’re with someone else. He isn’t sure why he’s there at all. If  you emerged from the crowd, what would he do? 

Fall to his fucking knees. Grovel if he had to, get the right goddamn words out this time around, apologize for the rest of his miserable life. Beg, plead, drag himself over hot coals, broken glass, not even to have you, but just so you could understand what had happened, what he meant when he asked if any of it was real. 

Chastity shakes her head, the end of her hair whipping over her shoulder like a little tail. “Ain’t seen her in. . .well, since the last time you was here. A year ago, maybe? Did she get out?” Her eyes widen and she grips the sleeve of his shirt in her fist. “Oh I always hoped that was what happened when she didn’t come back.” 

He doesn’t know how to answer her, clearly you’d never returned to the club, never spoken to anyone there again. It loosens the pressure in his chest, a little, ribs expanding to give his heart a little more room.  

You’ve never needed his help. You’re determined and tenacious enough that you would have made it through no matter what, but he’s glad you didn’t have to, that he could help you along even if you bristled at it, struggled with it. 

“What brings you back, baby? Didn’t think I’d see you around here again.” 

He’s reminded of the first time Chastity had approached him, fingers on his thigh, breasts pressed against his bicep, the chill that had swept down his spine, because she’s so very young. Big crystal eyes and dewy skin, a smile that put a dimple in her cheek. 

She curls her hand around his forearm, tips of her nails digging into his flesh, sharp, metallically unfamiliar. Joel shakes his head, teeth grinding together. His jaw aches, pain springing up between his eyes, narrowing the veins in his heart. 

“I’m kinda disappointed in her, y’know?” Chastity continues when Joel doesn’t answer. “I could tell she was sweet on ya and didn’t want to be. She wanted to wait for you so bad every week and pretended she didn’t care if you showed up. Oh, like she didn’t know you’d be back.” 

“I, uh, yeah. I guess I was partial to her.” 

“Y’all ever see each other again? I thought you ran off together,” she sighs dreamily. “Like that movie. Since you both never came back.” 

He doesn’t ask what movie she’s talking about, stuck on her assertion that you’d waited for him, wanted him to come back and pick you. 

Joel is pulled out of his thoughts when she cups him through his jeans and squeezes. He jerks up out of his seat so suddenly the stool scrapes on the sticky floor. 

“I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I don’t know why I’m here.” 

She smiles. “You want her. It’s all right, some men are like that. You haven’t offended me.” 

Jesus Christ. As if it couldn’t get any more pathetic. 

“Just. . .if she comes back, tell her. . .” 

Tell her what? That he was looking for her at the site of her trauma? Turning back up to this place like he was fixing to buy her? Again? Or to stick his dick in someone else? Like a goddamn coward?

He has your fucking phone number. He could call you. 

“No—”

Chastity winks, strokes the backs of her fingers against his cheek. “I’ll tell her you’re lookin’ for her, if she comes back. She’s lucky, I do just about anything for a chance.”  

The drive back is worse. 

The gaping emptiness seems to yawn wider, grow more smiling teeth. 

At least it’s deserved. 

.

.

.

He dreams about you.

Mostly of your accusing gatsby eyes turned sad and sullen and disappointed, betrayed and broken, turning away from him, walking away and not returning. He always reaches for you too late, never able to stop you before the door slams behind you again and again and again. 

You never speak. 

Just look at him like you aren’t sure who he is, cocking your head to the side like a curious bird. 

One month after, one month since, he dreams of you on your knees. 

You peer up at him with offering, distant eyes, temptuous and tumultuous and teasing and nothing at all like yourself.

Your back is pressed against a concrete wall, cracked pavement beneath your bloody knees, fingers circled around his cock. A voice twists around the stem of his mind, words that stung and ached and pulsed, plump with shame and determinism. I had to pull over on the way home and throw up and my knees got all bloody and scratched, but in a way I was grateful. 

The red neon sign flickers and zaps behind you, casting you in shades of black and red, like you’re trapped in a dark room, flashes of hungry eyes like cameras in the dark, taking what they want, holding it close. 

His arm is braced against the wall and for just a moment he can’t help but give into it, the warm, expert drag of your tongue over his cock, the soft interior of your mouth when you swallow him down, choking around him, hands stroking his thighs. 

It feels so good to be close to you again, even if its like this. 

But you gag and pull back, spit connecting your mouth to him, lips parted and waiting, the squelch of your fist around him, quick and expert. 

“Cherry,” he groans, pulling back gently, the warm imprint of your hands anchoring on his thighs for balance. “Hold on. You ain’t gotta—I need to—

“You need to come, I know. I’m just a whore, Joel,” you murmur, soft and sweet, the words pillowy and hypnotic. “You can do whatever you want. Fuck me. Hurt me. Do you want to hurt me?” 

Whatever threads of pleasure and fantasy the dream had given him, shatter. “Hold on—”

“Am I not doing a good job? Please, Joel, tell me I’m good. That’s all I ever wanted.” Big, shiny eyes, blank and unseeing, yanking at your top. Your lips are wet and swollen. “Do you want to see my tits?” 

He reaches down and takes your hands in his, drags you up from your place on the ground. “Listen—”

“But this is what I am.” Angry, now. Hissing. “This is what I do. This is what you want.” 

“Cherry.” Shaking you a little, desperate for you to hear him, to break you out of this terrible nightmare. 

You lean close, he can see the red neon reflected in your eyes, pupils so swollen they appear black. It reminds him of those girls in the laps of men three times their age, the thready nicety of their laughter, the angular pulse of mirroring want, the drugs showing in skinny faces and blown out eyes. 

“This is what you want me to be.” 

“No—” he says, voice hoarse.  

Joel has never been good with saying what he means. The words get crossed and something else comes out. This time he forces it out. “I fell in love with you.” 

“You don’t even know my name.” 

Cutting in its clarity, in its truth. 

“I know, I know,” he whispers, anguished, desperate for what he says to be the thing he means for once. He reaches for you, but your body is too far from his suddenly, the logic of dreams tacking on space where there was none. “I fucking know,” he says, dropping his hands, “but I want to. And, honey, I—” 

“Do you think you should? After you called me a liar?”

He swallows and nods, because he deserves it, reaching again only for you to step away from his grasp this time, circling him with your chin tilted down, a marionette doll trailing in jerky circles around him. “That wasn’t what I meant—”

“How would I know that, Joel? I’m a whore.” You’re behind him, fingers trailing across the back of his neck like the icy veins river. “Is anything I say true? How would you know it’s not another lie?” You stop in front of him, head tilting so far to the side you look like a doll with its strings cut, neck broken. “I love you,” you croon in a voice that’s not your own, deeply sarcastic, and then laugh, “Do you believe me now?”

He lurches awake up with a gasp. 

The dream doesn’t fade; it remains pulsingly real, achingly sore, in his chest. Like a wolf in a cage. 

Bars of soft pink light are just starting to spill across the walnut floorboards of his bedroom, a soft rose that reminds him of you, the fleshy interior of sour cherries. The sheets are damp and yellowed with sweat and his neck aches from the harsh grind of his teeth. 

He feels each one of his years as he sits up with a grunt, reminded of how much like those other men he really is, no matter what he tells himself. He’d defiled you too, bought you too, let you suck his cock and asked you to parade yourself in front of him, fuck yourself for his pleasure. Just because he’d been gentler than those other men didn’t erase that he’d done the same thing.

Pathetic and delusional and lonely and in denial about it, just as his brother had accused. And shamed, now, too, saddled with more grief that one person should be able to handle, than one body can house without breaking down into ash and withered ventricles.  

His shame feels all the more damning, because his cock is still achingly hard between his legs. 

Joel makes no move to touch himself. 

He’d avoided it, anyway, since that last time with you, because he knew he’d see you if he gave into the desire. He’d see the curve of your hips and weight of your thighs and breasts, the shape of your belly beneath skirts and jeans and t-shirts, the soft press of your flesh against his, pliant and soft. 

Instead, he sits at the edge of the bed and breathes heavily through his nose, replaying the dream, the specter of your blownout pupils, the wresting tumble of your body around his, accusations he deserved on your lips. 

He doesn’t have many regrets in his life; but he regrets the way he let you leave. Fearful and biting and not like yourself. He hadn’t been thinking clearly either. 

Then I guess we ain’t got nothin’ to say to each other.

What else were you supposed to think? It wasn’t like he gave you a chance to speak; it wasn’t like he explained himself, what he meant when he asked you if any of it was real. 

Any affection you might have felt for him has surely been washed away by contempt and loathing, but it might be an idea to tell you what he had meant to say. What he meant when he asked you if it were real. It probably hadn’t been to you, but that wasn’t your fault, and you deserved to know that at least. 

When he jerks off in the shower for the first time in weeks, he sees the dewy glow of your skin by the pool last summer, the slow peel of your bathing suit top revealing peaked nipples and soft flesh, the perfect o of your lips when you come, the taste of cherry coke on your mouth, the ever present scent of cigarette smoke and blue bell perfume. 

He fucking hates himself for it. It’s not good and half painful. The sad swirl of white down the shower drain an even more pathetic and shameful image than he thought it would be. 

Joel dresses and avoids his face in the mirrors he passes, slamming the front door too hard behind him. He doesn’t think, can’t, if he’s busy, so he gets to work even if the horses remind him of you, at least it’s not in the black swirl of the club, but the warm twist of sun, and laughter. 

.

.

.

It’s karmic, cosmic, fucking fateful, that the package is delivered later that day. 

One month in, one month away, time counted in months since.

A month since the hotel, a month since he watched the door shut behind you, fingers of grief and stark anxiety trailing across your face, wrenching away from him like he was one of those men, because in his desperation to keep you, to know you felt the same, he’d become one of them, worse than one of them. 

Don’t touch me. None of it was real. 

There’s no address, but it’s obvious it’s from you, carried inside, carefully placed on his kitchen table. 

The credit card and perfume and sparrow sit nestled innocently within when he pries it open. The sparrow is carefully wrapped in newspaper, like you hadn’t been able to bear the thought of it being damaged, coming to harm. 

He hasn’t eaten all day, worked long hours outside in the sun. The dream weighs like a rock tied around his throat, dragging him under violent seas. 

The blood drains from his face. 

He has to sit down, suddenly feeling like the floor might swallow him whole, a familiar prickling in his chest that he has been assured is nothing at all, a product of something in his head, just the residual pain of losing people over and over again, of sitting in an empty house.  

“Oh, Christ,” he mutters, feeling the weight of the last month so suddenly, like the pitch and tilt of those lost days have finally been unburdened on his shoulders. 

He unwraps the sparrow carefully, the little bird he thought you might like, that he thought of you while carving, a bird that reminds him of summer and home and now you. 

The little hope he’d been holding onto shatters, as fragile as his belief in it. 

He searches fruitlessly for a note, anything to tell him what you’d been thinking as you tucked each item into the box. But there’s nothing but silence, the scrape of desperate fingers over cardboard, the echo of an empty life. 

He’s left with nothing but dust, remains of shattered fragments, wasted dreams. The newspaper is balled in his fist. He sits with the pain and loss until his fingers loosen on the paper, until he can swipe a tired hand down his face. A flash of too dark, irregular lettering catches his eye as he tosses the paper back in the box. 

The ink blends so well with the printed words that he almost misses it. A note cleverly blended into the newsprint. He has to squint to read it, tear the words apart. 

You probably won’t look closely enough to see this, because I understand how you must feel about me. I’m not sure if I want you to see it. But there was something I wanted to tell you, anyway. You were the only person I wanted to tell. I was offered a place in the doctoral program, I thought you’d like to know. I should have told you on the phone when you were fixing the step, when things were still good between us, then maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything, because I’m still not who you want me to be. I still don’t understand what happened. 

-Cherry 

Joel reads the note over a couple of times, caressing the indented paper with his thumb, knowing your hand left it imprinted there. The newspaper carries the scent of you, warm and steady. 

He pulls the words apart, rolls them over his tongue. 

Joel digs his phone out of his pocket, searches for your contact and then waits. You won’t pick up, that much he knows, but he can leave a voicemail, and maybe in time you’ll listen to it. 

What he wants to say is wiped from his memory when the line clicks. Silence trembles in the wake of that sound, feeble, like a heartbeat heard over radio waves. 

“Cherry?” he asks. His voice sounds desperate and shaky to his own ears. You don’t answer but he can hear you breathing, the slow, anxious inhale and exhale, so terribly close, like he could reach out and scoop the water of your voice into his hands, cup it against his mouth. “Are you there, darlin’? I—” 

It’s a mistake, to speak again, hoarse and despairing, before you do, but his nerves are shot and you’re so close. 

The line clicks again and you’re gone. 

Misery settles like a familiar blanket around his shoulders. 

The house has never seemed emptier. 

.

.

.

Evening light slants over the ranch, through dark green leaves and yellowing foliage, burned by the day’s relentless sun. 

It’s late, the last dregs of the day’s light a mere suggestion on the horizon, lavender and periwinkle that bleeds into red and midnight blue, a frothing of gray clouds lining the crescent of the rising moon. 

Joel plays a mindless tune on the guitar slung across his lap, a melody that is slowly forming into something deeper. A pretty, low noted song, that he won’t admit could be for you, might be for you, about you. It keeps his thoughts organized, away from the harsher reality of what usually worked through his mind, one terrible thought after another, one mistake after another, not sure how to fix any of it, not sure he should. 

It’d probably be better for him to stay well away.  

He’s only slightly startled when Ellie’s boots march up his front steps as night encroaches, enclosing him in its fist.

She doesn’t say anything, just plops down in the chair next to him, wood creaking beneath them, the soft singing and snuffling of animals in the trees, insects in the grass. For a while he keeps playing, watching Ellie from the corner of his eye. 

“Pretty,” she says eventually when he lets the tune find a natural end. “I like it.” 

Joel nods and sits up to lean the guitar against the bannister. “Thanks, kiddo. What brings you all the way out here?” 

She shrugs and stands, leaning over the porch railing instead. “You, I guess.” 

“Uh-huh. What about me?” 

She takes a big breath and shakes her head, fidgeting with her fingers, mouth twisting to the side. All the usual signs of worry in her, not unfamiliar these days. 

“You were different,” she starts, looking at her feet. “After Sarah and Tess, I mean. And even worse, Tommy said, when. . .” she trails off and Joel doesn’t ask her what she means. “Anyway, you seemed happy for a while and I thought it was because of me. Because we were talking again. And it was that, but there’s, like, something else right?” 

She looks at him over her shoulder, embarrassment stretching over her features. “Did you, uh, like. . .are you going through a fucking breakup or something? You were really fucking happy and now you aren’t all of a sudden.”

Joel breathes out hard, slaps one hand against his thigh and stands. “How’d you go and figure somethin’ like that?” 

“I’m not fucking blind, Joel,” she answers with a roll of her eyes. He leans on the railing next to her, feels her shoulder bump his. “So? C’mon.” 

He watches the grass, the yellow-green waiver of it in the fading sun. “Well,” he sighs heavily, “I guess that’s what you’d call it.” 

“What?” 

“A breakup.”

“Sorry.” 

“Well,” he breathes out, “it’s my own goddamn fault.”

Silence lingers between them for a moment before Ellie nudges him again. “Are you gonna tell me about it or not?” When he shakes his head, she groans and leans back, hands still curled around the railing, wood groaning in protest. “C’mon, Joel. You promised we’d tell each other the truth about stuff.” 

He clears his throat and opens his hands, palms supplicating, fingers aching as they unfurl. “That’s a little different, Ellie. This ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.” 

She scoffs. “If it’s got to do with you, it’s got to do with me,” she reminds him, something he’d said her whole life, when she was little and fierce and he’d lied to her. 

Anna’s accidental re-emergence into Ellie’s life had nearly ended his relationship with her. A poor decision made in a vacuum by two adults doing their best, that made the best decision at the time. A lie retold so many times about his adoption of her that it had eventually started to seem like the truth. 

“Yeah, I guess you got me there, kiddo.” Joel relents, thinking of those months without her. But he’d told his fucking brother and look how that had blown up in his face.

“So? What happened?” 

He takes a deep breath, and wonders how much to tell. All of it, most of it. He leaves out a lot of the finer, more sordid details, things Ellie wouldn’t want to hear anyway, that didn’t matter so much to how things turned out. But he tells her honestly about your age, how he met you.

Ellie shuffles her feet and then looks at him from the corner of her eye. Her face is pink and his own is warm. It feels like picking a scab off a wound, and uneasy besides, telling your kid that you’d accidentally solicited sex and then fell in love with said sex worker. 

“Kinda hypocritical of you, huh? The stuff about lying.”

He bristles and straightens, his confrontation with Tommy flashing through his mind. “I know,” he sighs heavily, out through his nose. “Weren’t really about that.” 

“I know,” she says, nodding at her toes again. “So she’s my age?” 

“A little older,” he grunts. 

Ellie mulls it over, nodding to herself for a while. “So you must really fucking like her.” 

“What?” 

“It’s so far out of fucking character, Joel,” she says. “So you have to care about her. Like, really care about her, to even think about it. And you need to talk to her. Because you’re fucking miserable.” 

The knot that’s lived in his heart for weeks now loosens with her words. He waves an impatient hand. “She don’t want to hear from me.” 

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.” She looks uncomfortable and awkward, but continues, “I think. . .I think it means you kind of have to. Even just to apologize.” 

Something eases in his chest, a weight pulling away from his bones, unburdening. “So you’re all right with it? With me and—” 

She shrugs. “Yeah. Maybe if you weren’t you, I’d have a problem. But,” she shrugs again, and leaves it at that. 

“You eat dinner yet?” 

“No.” 

He tells Ellie a little more about you, colors in the details and edges of you, over burgers. 

It feels uncomfortable. It feels okay.  

.

.

.

It’s almost one in the morning when Joel answers his phone, trilling sharply, the dark night pressing in tightly around the edge of his vision, grasping at the edges of his consciousness. “Hello?” 

“Joel? It’s me. Don’t fucking freakout okay?” 

He sits up in bed, tugging back the blankets. “What happened?” He growls, flicking on the light, already yanking on his jeans. “Ellie?” 

“Me and Dina were in a hit and run. We’re fine. It’s fine, okay? I’m okay.” 

The blood runs out of his face, chest constricting tightly, heart squeezing, the narrowing scope of barely choked down panic, flashes of Sarah, Tess, the orange of leaping flame. “Where are you?” He asks, descending the steps, not bothering with the lights, feeling his way through the dark. 

“We just don’t have a spare tire, and the back one is blown out—”

“Where are you?” He repeats, front door slamming behind him. 

“I’ll drop a pin.” Then, softer, “I’m fine, Joel. Did you hear me? The car is barely scratched. I’m okay.” 

“Don’t move, clear? I’ll be there soon.”

She sighs, “Okay.” 

.

.

.

When Joel finishes changing Ellie’s tire an hour later and wrenches the truck door open, his phone is ringing again, a bright white light against the dark interior of the cab. He reaches for it, just as it quiets. 

The night has been nerve rattling enough. He doesn’t have many more people in his life he can spare, that would call him in the dead of night.

He’d like to say there isn’t a tremble in his hands, but that’s just not true.

The night is still long and dark, the call of a coyote piercing in the distance. “Joel?” Ellie calls. “You okay?” 

“Yeah, kiddo,” he turns to find her standing in the open door of her car, one arm braced along the top of it, Dina peering at him from the passenger seat behind him “Go on home. Get some sleep.” 

“You too, old man.” She hesitates before climbing in. “Thanks for the help.” 

“Thanks, Joel!” Dina echoes. 

“Yep.” 

Ellie nods and the door slams, her car off the side of the road in a cloud of rusted gray air. 

Joel takes a breath and wonders what fire he’s going to have to put out next. It can only be Tommy or Maria. There isn’t anyone else left. He just hopes it doesn’t have to do with a car. 

His heart drops out of his chest and smashes somewhere near his feet when he sees your name. Five missed calls within seconds of each other. Twenty-five minutes have elapsed since the last call, before a sixth came in.

The last missed call is accompanied by a voicemail. 

Joel wants to feel elated that you called, but dread soaks into the lining of his soul, reminded of other missed calls, another dark night, the flash of headlights against twisted metal, far away voices telling him not to look, what hospital to go to. 

He thumbs the voicemail open and presses the phone to his ear. After weeks of not hearing your voice, after weeks of silence, he’s finally going to hear your voice again. Not that he deserves to, but it will be there, recorded on his phone. 

It is not your voice that spirals out of the speaker. 

“Hey, this is Matt. I think I’ve got the right Joel. I’m a friend of—” There’s a shuffling sound, the crisp tones of professional voices, the squeak of sneakers over vinyl flooring, beeping. Hauntingly familiar and unpleasant. 

Matt repeats an unfamiliar name several times, something about a party, something about drinking too much, or maybe drugs, Matt doesn’t know, they’re at the hospital now. They’re at the hospital, Matt and—

It takes Joel a moment to realize Matt is talking about you, that the unfamiliar name is you, that he’s hearing your real name for the first time, from a stranger’s mouth. That you’re in the hospital. 

“I don’t think she remembers saying it but she asked me to call you again, and I think she needs you. So, yeah, I don’t know, man. If you get this, you know where she’ll be.”

The voicemail starts over. 

He has to listen to it three times. The hospital Matt mentions is two hours away.

.

.

.

Your mouth is dry, tongue woolen and acid in your cheek. 

The nurse is telling you to take it easy, to continue hydrating. You nod, not really hearing her, still dizzy as you bite your lip and sign the discharge paperwork, anxiety creeping like a vine up your back, curling like a noose around your throat. You still feel woozy and far away in your own skin. 

Matt is standing next to you, hand delicately against your spine. 

You aren’t sure you want him to touch you, but you let it happen anyway, because the weight is comforting against your back, asking for nothing more than that. And you feel bad for ruining his night. It makes you feel worse that you think of offering to blow him to make up for it. 

The humiliation and shame you feel over the whole thing is so familiar it barely registers. It might as well be the default for the narrative of your life. Not only did Matt have to save you from the bathroom floor, he’d paid for the Uber to the hospital and accompanied you there, listening to you painfully, openly recounting the tragedy of Joel. You only remember half of what you’d said, the car ride there swimming in and out of focus. 

Shaking and crying and sweating so much your shirt was damp by the time you arrived at an emergency clinic that thankfully wasn't too busy, making the driver nervous and intensely relieved when he could finally drop you off, you’d told him you were sorry for thinking you were ready to have sex with someone else, even no strings attached sex in a some frat brother’s bedroom. 

Sorry for ruining his last night out in this town before moving across the country, for crying on him, for taking something you shouldn’t have, that little pill in that girl’s hand, when all he wanted to do was get his dick wet.

You told him pretty much everything you could about Joel without saying what you can’t reveal to anyone, that you’d prostituted yourself to him, became a sugarbaby, stupidly fell in fucking love, to be rejected so fully, it feels like the insides of you are peaking through your ribs, raw and bloody. 

“He’s older than me,” you’d finished lamely, tears clinging to your cheeks and lashes. “A lot older. And I thought. . .I thought things were different. But he doesn’t give a fuck about me and I’m not over him and I’m sorry.”

You feel sticky and grimy and filthily disgusted with yourself. The nurse’s droning finally comes to a stop. “Do you have any questions?” 

You shake your head and turn away from the desk, the metallic clicking of the automatic door sliding open as you do, feeling young and stupid and more vulnerable than you ever have before. 

“I’m really sorry,” you say, trying to smile as his hand slides away from your back. “You probably think I’m crazy.” 

“Crazy is hot,” he says with a smile. “And, c’mon, that girl didn’t tell you what she was giving you. Emotional state didn’t help.” He shrugs, seeming totally at ease, “Shit happens.” 

You shake your head and feel its kindness and grace you don’t deserve. You’ve made a pathetic fucking fool of yourself, and in front of someone who knows you’re supposed to be a doctoral candidate. 

“Matt—” You start but when you glance up, there’s another man stalking across the lobby toward you, hands balled in fists at his sides, shoulders tense beneath his t-shirt. 

Your feet carry you toward him without your permission, meeting him halfway in the nearly deserted waiting room. 

Joel curls one hand against your bicep, the other placed gently against your jaw. He’s so warm. The scent of him, salt and leather and oil, washes over you in a comforting wave. You swear your heart rate slows, tension along your bones releasing. 

“Cherry,” he murmurs and you want to cringe away from the sound of that name on his lips, the curl of that sin soaked thing in front of someone who doesn’t know what it means. “Cher, darlin’, are you all right?” 

It doesn’t occur to you to wonder how he’s there, he just is, and despite the turmoil of the last few weeks, you feel almost instantly comforted, safe. There must be some other reason he’s there, someone he loves must be at the clinic, a conincidence. “Joel. What happened? Why are you here? Is Ellie all right?” 

He frowns, squeezes your arm gently, tugging you closer to him. “I’m here for you, darlin’. Ain’t it obvious? Are you all right?” 

And maybe it is obvious, maybe it should be. He’s looking you over, like there’ll be physical signs of harm, but you’re just exhausted and drawn, and in need of rest. 

“I’m okay.” 

“Good.” He hasn’t let go of you; you’re falling into his arms, his heartbeat against your ear, the warmth of his body soaking into yours. “It’s okay,” he soothes, rubbing your spine in a gentle arc. “I’m gonna take you home.” 

Anger soaked in bitter vinegar crashes into you all at once. You jerk out of his grip. “I don’t need you to do that.” 

“I know, I know,” he murmurs after a moment, soothingly like you’re a spooked horse likely to buck him. “I, uh, well—”

He seems lost for words, frozen in an awkward unsure way. 

“I can get home by myself,” you say harshly, folding your arms around your torso, pieces clicking together in your mind. The outpouring of emotion, your things left with Matt while you were seen by a doctor. He’d probably called Joel. When you turn to glare at him, he’s already gone. 

“I can get a cab, an Uber,” you assert, stepping back from Joel, “I don’t need you to. . . take care of me. You made it very clear what you think of me.” To your horror, your voice cracks and your mouth trembles, the floor seems to tilt beneath you. “I don’t need to hear it all again.” 

It’s only then that you really look at him, fiercely meeting his eyes, and some small amount of clarity returns to you. How sallow and worn he looks under the fluorescent lights, stark unforgivingly white light that adds years and wrinkles to his face. His eyes are shadowed, an exhausted tilt to his body. 

He looks awful, like he hasn’t slept in years. 

You reach out and touch the purpled skin beneath one eye, cupping his jaw, the familiar scrape of his beard against your palm. He closes his eyes and leans into your hand, like a cat in a spot of sunshine, like nothing terrible ever happened between you. 

“Why are you here?” You ask again. 

“Darlin’,” he says. “Somebody tells me you’re in the hospital, and you think I ain’t gonna turn up? Driving here damn killed me, I was so worried.” 

You shake your head. “Don’t say that to me,” you whisper, voice breaking again, tears thick at the back of your throat. “You don’t get to say that to me. Don’t pretend like you give a fuck.”

“I know, I know,” he repeats. “But, honey, I got some things I need to say to you—”

“I think you’ve said enough,” you snarl, voice shaking with rage. “There’s only so many ways you can call me a pathetic whore, Joel.” 

His face evens out, brows tilting down. “Now I know them words never came out of my mouth.” His voice is flat and tense.

You think again about that afternoon, the pretty wash of light, Joel’s damp skin, the painful realization you were losing everything, that the man you loved thought nothing of you. “Maybe you didn’t say it, Joel,” you say viciously, “but that’s what you. . .that’s how you made me feel. That is what you said. I’m a dumb little girl that lied to you about everything. So I’m the worthless whore you always pretended I wasn’t.” 

The room goes silent, the distant sounds of nurses’ shoes down hallways, traffic on the road outside, a cough from the person at the admit desk watching you and trying not to let on that they are. 

The anger simmering low in your gut that you never release, too afraid, too cowardly, too beaten down to give into suddenly surges out of you, wobbling and uncertain but scathing all the same. “You are. . .you fucked me like I was nothing, and then tossed me like I was fucking trash.” 

Words crowd around the entrance of your mouth, knocking against your teeth, desperate to be the first out. “And that’s fine, I guess. It’s what I signed up for, it’s what I deserved. But it. . .God, it hurt. Because you said it wasn’t like that. At least all those other pricks were honest with me about wanting to hurt me and fuck me and beat me senesless, but you—” Your voice cracks, pitched into a high whine and you’re no longer being quiet. “You were kind to me. You made me believe in you; you made me believe that good men exist. You made me believe that you wouldn’t hurt me.” 

A splitting headache lances up your neck and into the back of your skull, before you shove past him and storm out the doors. If you keep going, you’re afraid you’ll start screaming, crying, that you might never stop. 

The parking lot is a mass of cars and weed choked pavement that you blindly traverse, breaths coming in short gasps that burn through your lungs. 

He didn’t come after you when you left the hotel, and he wouldn’t now.

The tears still don’t fall but the panic is eating you from the inside out, colonizing your lungs until you feel like you can’t breathe. Dizzy and exhausted and emotionally wrung out. You want to go home and lie down for the rest of him, until your body disintegrates into ash, until the world finally stops moving, finally gives you a break. 

You stop near the back of the lot, reaching for your phone, thinking to stop and call a car instead of stumbling around without purpose. 

The ringing in your ears fades when your brain finally has something to focus on, a task to complete, something to calm you, a sure action to take.

Someone is shouting, calling after you, running through the parking lot. 

Joel, coming after you.

Your name on his lips. 

Not Cherry, not darlin’, not honey. 

Your name.  

When you turn he’s there, panting and determined. 

He says your name again, and you hate that you love the slow caress of it, the roll of the syllables like the sound of home over his tongue, in his voice. It sounds safe in his mouth. 

“Let me take you home,” he says. “That’s it. I won’t ask for nothin’ else.”

There’s a desperation you can’t understand in his features. If you meant nothing, why is he standing there, saying your name? 

“There’re other girls, Joel.” 

“There ain’t.” He holds out his hand. “Just let me take you home, I won’t say nothin’ else. You’re still sick and swayin’ just standing there, darlin’.”

You consider it so long, he offers, “We’ll stop and get you a coke.” 

“Cherry?” You ask, stepping closer to him. You just want to sit down, and you don’t want to pay for a car. And your name sounds so gentle on his tongue, mesmerizingly, tantalizingly safe. 

He drops his hand, letting you pass without touching you, a breath released from somewhere deep in his chest. “Always.”

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

cw: brief description of domestic abuse

sad pathetic reader stumbling into a local pub all drenched because of the rain, heaving and crying and pretty in your suffering that it has simon’s straightening up on his seat with a pleased purr rumbling from his chest.

“wh’?” johnny asks from where he’s got his cheek smooshed on kyle’s shoulder. “wh’s goin’ on?”

but simon’s already standing up—all big and imposing and rugged—and all john can give his drunk sergeant is a tip of his head towards your direction with something muttered from under his breath. something like he’ll break ‘er and might ‘ave t’ do some damage control after this.

.

you startle at the heavy body that drops beside you, before shrinking into yourself. you wonder if he’s found you; if your attempts have been nothing but futile, and tears begin to well up in your eyes, choking you up as anguish slams into you once again.

you think of begging him; of apologizing.

you shouldn’t have to—he cheated on you, after all; it’s his fault that this even happened, but you remember his anger; his voice, booming as he yells; his hand poised for a strike. you remember the desperation that filled you; the sudden surge of adrenaline that led you here, away from him.

god, you should have ran farther.

you should have done more. you should have—

“easy there, little mouse,” a voice that you do not recognize breaks through the haze. it is deep and gravelly and rumbling, and you—

you find that you can breathe again.

fingers twitching, body still taut in tension, you turn, trying to see who it is. to put a face on the rumbled croon, but all you find is a hulking figure squeezed in the booth beside you. masked. scarred.

someone who is not from here, that you’re sure of. no one can look this…terrifying without being forgotten.

his eyes crinkle in his smile, you suppose, when you finally look up at him. then, the deep purr once more; something pleased and giddy and almost teasing.

“well, would you look at that—she’s a pretty thing, ‘fter all.”

your breath stutters as heat slams into you, burning and building like a miasmic fever taking over. you try to say something, anything at all, but his eyes are dark pools of something heady, and you feel so small beneath his gaze.

you feel seen, but in a way that is pervasive. like he knows what brought you here; what you are running away from.

you feel comforted. this—he—is not dangerous enough to run back to where you came from.

he croons again, and this time, you feel yourself responding—the tension seeps out from your pores, loosening the tautness of your muscles, leaving you to finally feel the exhaustion burning underneath your skin. you don’t even startle when he raised a hand to brush his knuckle along your jaw.

“yes. jus’ like that,” he murmurs, breathy himself.

you lick at your chapped lips, heart squeezing when you find his eyes devouring the sight. “thank you.”

he cups your cheek this time and swipes his thumb just underneath your eye. you don’t even mind that he’s yet to say his name or why slowly, almost tentatively, you’re being flanked by what you think are his mates.

[dreamtofus]

Hunter Simon Riley hunting Witch Reader. CW : Hate sex, biting, tit play, unprotected sex, slightly mean Simon, brief fight but nothing graphic.

He'd been tracking you for months, every time he thought he'd cornered you, you would slip out of his grasp at every turn.

Simon had tracked you down to a small town in Kansas, watching you stalk into the woods, presumably to perform one of your rituals.

He followed you silently, being careful not to tread on anything that would alert you to his presence.

As you knelt down and began pulling out the items for your ritual, you heard a twig snap directly behind you. Before you could even turn to face what was behind you, there was a thick arm around your waist and a blade against your throat.

"Riley" you muttered with an eye roll.

"Couldn't let you slip away this time, baby" Simon growled against your ear.

Immediately you threw your head back, grinning in satisfaction as you heard Simon hiss in pain from your head meeting his nose.

He stumbled back and you turned around, only for Simon to lunge at you.

The scuffle was intense. There were a few moments you believed you may lose, but you always managed to pull through.

You pant heavily as Simon pinned you to a tree with the blade against your throat once more. Simon also out of breath but refusing to seem vulnerable.

Your eyes met Simons. The same eyes that multiple supernatural beings saw before meeting their ends. And yet strangely, you didn't feel fear. You just felt desire.

You acted fast. Grabbing Simons hair and tugging him to meet your lips.

You were surprised that Simon didn't immediately try and push you away, or hurt you. But instead bit your bottom lip and kissed you deeply. Groaning into your mouth.

Simons hands went under your thighs, lifting you up against the tree, growling as he bit down on your neck.

You scrambled to pull at the string of your bust, the fabric falling away and Simon leaned down, lifting you slightly higher so he could latch his mouth to your left breast at a comfortable angle.

You moaned as Simons tongue flicked against your hardened nipple, gripping his hair tight when he bit down, soothing the pleasurable sting with his tongue.

Eventually, Simon got impatient. He shoved your skirt up and ripped your panties, pulling your legs slightly tighter around his hips so he could unbuckle his belt without the worry of you falling.

You whined as Simon ran the fat tip of his cock through your folds. Your head tipping back against the tree as a drawled out moan fell from your lips, Simon finally sliding into you.

He barely gave you time to adjust. His thrusts angry and hard. Each one making you moan louder than the last.

"Fucking shut up, witch. Don't need the town knowing I'm fucking you" Simon growled against your neck.

"Thought you'd want everyone to know that you fuck good" you pout mockingly between moans. Making Simon snap his hips at just the right angle.

Simons rough fingers came down to rub at your clit. The combined stimulation making you gasp and grab at his hair.

Your mouth fell into a silent scream as you came on his cock. Simon thrusting a few more times before spilling into you. A small groan of satisfaction coming from him.

Once you had recovered from your powerful orgasm, you assumed that Simon would just drop you and leave. But he didn't. He merely made sure you were decent before throwing you over his shoulder and stalking back to his truck.

"Not letting go of this pussy, now, swee'eart. Even if you're a witch"

⛧°. ⋆𓌹♰𓌺⋆. °⛧

[dreamtofus]

something, something about the 141 men all being quite obsessed with you, placing bets who could get you first— everyone thinks it’s Kyle, he’s charming, handsome, who wouldn’t swoon at his feet?

Maybe even Johnny, he’s a bit of a dog, but he has a way with women, by some miracle, and he’s smart, maybe it’s his blue eyes.

No one thought it would be Simon, their lieutenant, of all people, anti-social, rough around every edge. A brute, curt, wears a skull.

Then one day, they get a message in the group chat from Simon, a picture attached. Kyle can’t believe it, Price, the dirty old man, saves it to his phone instantly, Johnny has to do a spit-take because there in the photo is you.

But it’s not just you.

It’s you perched on Simon’s lap.

Naked from the head down, back facing the camera, with your face buried in Simon’s neck. Simon gets a low enough angle, gets a perfect view of your pussy, stretched wide over his fat cock. Puffy and swollen, glistening with your sopping arousal.

With a simple sentence:

‘Look who I found’

[dreamtofus]

RETURN TO SENDER | simon riley

It was a joke. A letter to a criminal—UK's most wanted. You told him he was hot. Told him you were a virgin. Left your address, because it’s not like he’d ever get out, right?

✉ 2K FOLLOWER SPECIAL .ᐟ | [ AO3 ]

18+ AU, DUBCON, fem!reader, takes place in the UK, porn with plot, pathetic!reader, harddom!simon, asshole!simon, implied stalking, (morally irredeemable) pining, oral (f receiving), shit-ton of degradation, praise if you use a magnifying glass, virginity kink, pussy pronouns, pussy & face slapping, dacryphilia, unprotected sex [ 10.2k words ]

Who knew working at Tesco would be such a fucking nightmare?

 It’s almost absurd how people can forget how to use their brains the second they step through the automatic doors. It’s a massive store, but you’ve come to believe that its sheer scale only amplifies some customers’ overwhelming stupidity. 

You find yourself watching, day in and day out, as people stumble over the easiest parts of shopping, like scanning a barcode or finding the right aisle despite the sign above their heads. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so damn frustrating. You can’t even afford the luxury of venting because you're stuck behind the register, forced to plaster on a fake smile, nodding while they hold up the line, your eye twitching as you answer the same question for the umpteenth time in 30 minutes.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity of gritted teeth and hollow patience, your shift comes to an end. The relief is brief, but it’s there, at least. You drag yourself out of the store, shoulders slumped under the weight of the day. The commute home isn’t any prettier, but it’s a kind of mindless ritual that’s grown familiar over time—20 minutes on the train, crammed between strangers who are just as exhausted, just as done with the grind. The train lurches and hums beneath you, a rhythmic noise that almost lets you forget the stress. But you’re too far gone for that kind of escape, your mind still whirling with all the things you’ve had to swallow throughout the day.

The train empties as the sun sinks below the horizon, each stop peeling away another layer of the late afternoon crowd. You finally step off the train at the final stop, the air crisper than when you left for work nearly 11 hours ago. The walk home is short, but it’s long enough for your legs to remind you that you’ve been standing for hours. Ten long minutes to your flat, a familiar route that feels both comforting and suffocating in its monotony. 

After walking down some quiet streets, past some sketchy alleyways, you finally reach your tiny one-bedroom flat. It’s tucked just outside Bromley, and it’s small, not much at all, but it’s enough. It’s the kind of space that suffocates you some days and feels like a sanctuary on others. You push your key into the lock and push the door open. You kick your shoes off and they thud as they hit the floor, echoing through your small flat. You hang your keys on the singular hook you stuck on the wall, barely noticing the clink of them settling into place. 

This is what most days look like for you: wake up, subject yourself to a long, draining shift, then return home to an empty flat and an even emptier fridge. It's a routine that feels as hollow as the flat itself. The days fly by in a boring cycle of work, silence, and the echo of things you thought you’d left behind when you took the leap and moved out.

After college, you made it a point to leave your parents’ house. You couldn’t stay in the nest anymore, not when you so strongly believed there was something better waiting out there. You had to prove you could stand on your own, that you didn’t need the constant supervision or the suffocating presence of a family that just didn’t get it. 

Honestly, who could? Who could stay locked in a house that felt less like a home and more like a cage? College had been the escape you’d craved, the independence you had  always wanted. You dove in headfirst, joining club after club, meeting all kinds of people, each one with their own story, a sort of authenticity that people in high school never had.

In college, one of the many things you got involved in was Vets Club, which wrote letters to veterans, thanking them for their service. It was a simple thing, but there was something about it that felt right. You’d write a few lines of gratitude, nothing big, just a small act of kindness. And sometimes, you’d get a letter back. The responses were always the same—surprised and grateful that someone even bothered to take the time. It never felt like much, but it always made you feel good, knowing you could brighten someone's day just by saying thank you.

But now, when you’re standing in your tiny flat, staring at a barren fridge that only houses a bottle of wine and some leftover takeaway containers, you wonder if wasting your time on asinine things like that were worth it. 

You’re having a… Well, a hard time, to put it kindly. The kind of time where nothing seems to go your way, and you can't quite shake the feeling that maybe you made some wrong choices. All of your college friends? They're out there, living it up, traveling the world, landing glamorous careers, posting photos of sunsets in Bali and dinners at places with names you can’t pronounce. They’re thriving, but you’re stuck here, watching their highlight reels on social media while your own life feels like it’s paused on a loop of dead-end shifts and lonely nights.

You had big dreams once. You convinced yourself that an art history degree was going to be the key to something meaningful, something that would set you apart. Now, though? Now, you can barely find work, and the opportunities that do pop up feel like they’re beyond you in all shapes and forms.

Rent and bills are manageable, but manageable doesn’t mean easy. To you, it means scraping by, choosing between a decent meal or keeping the lights on for another month.

Your parents help sometimes, covering the electricity bill here and there, but you’d rather die than let them know how bad it really is. You don’t need their pity, their unsolicited advice, or the smug ‘I told you so’ about picking a more practical degree. No matter how deep you’re sinking, you’ll claw your way up alone. It’s not pride, it’s survival. You’ve always done it yourself, it’s just easier that way. 

And the real kicker? The cherry on top of this already pathetic sundae? You’re a fucking virgin. No one to warm your bed, keep you company. Mid-twenties and untouched, while your friends from high school are already posting pictures of shiny rings and baby-bumps. Like struggling to stay afloat wasn’t humiliating enough, you’re also trailing behind in the one thing that’s supposed to have happened already.

You’ve had chances—plenty of chances—but every time, you freeze. The pressure, the vulnerability, and the fear of not measuring up always make you bail.

Not that you’re a prude. You’ve done everything but. Had shitty oral a few times, given it even more. And if the guy’s screaming was anything to go by, you were either naturally good at it or he was just being dramatic. Either way, it was a fleeting moment of triumph in an otherwise awkward, unremarkable sex life, not quite the high point you’d imagined, but in your world of half-hearted hookups and ‘almosts,’ it was something. Proof you weren’t completely out of your depth.

Not that it really mattered.

You shut the fridge and turn to open the cabinet with the same lack of enthusiasm that’s come to define your evenings alone. Peanut butter and jelly, quick, mindless, barely even a choice. You spread the peanut butter, then the jelly, the motion mechanical, just something to fill the silence. The takeout leftovers can last till tomorrow.

You pad over to and collapse on your second-hand couch, the cushions sighing under your weight, and pull your legs beneath you. You grab your phone out of your pocket, thumb idly swiping up to unlock it. The screen lights up, and for a moment, you just stare at it. An infant-sized handful of notifications blink back at you—an automated bill reminder, a news alert you’ll ignore, a lone text from your mom checking in. That’s it. No stream of messages, no flood of tagged posts or party invites. Just a near-empty notification bar, silent in its own damning way.

With a sigh, you lock your phone and toss it aside, letting it land somewhere on the cushion beside you. No one’s waiting for you to reply anyway.  Instead, you grab the remote and flick on the TV. The screen blinks to life and you skim through a few channels, the lowest-tier cable offering not much more than black-and-white novellas and the news. You settle for the latter, knowing it won’t add much to your day, but it’ll at least fill the space with noise.

The pretty woman on the screen drones on about politics and stocks, things you don’t have the capacity to care for. You nibble at your sandwich, half-listening as the segment shifts. The soft murmur of the newscaster is background noise until something catches your ear, an undercurrent of excitement creeping into her voice as she announces a breaking story. Your attention sharpens as she mentions a supposed notorious figure, someone whose name apparently carries weight in the world of crime.

A man known only as Ghost. No full name, no history, just a shadow stitched together by word of mouth and grainy security footage. The anchor’s voice is steady as she rattles off his crimes. High-profile armed robberies that bled banks dry, embezzlement schemes that unraveled entire corporations, and a trail of bodies left in the wake of meticulously executed mob hits.

It’s the kind of name you’d expect to hear on the news, or in the underbelly of the city where crime festers unchecked. A name spoken with a mix of fear and reverence, as if he was more myth than man.

And yet, despite knowing nothing about him beyond what you've learned in the last 5 minutes of the broadcast, the sight of him on your TV—towering, masked,—hits you in a way you hadn’t anticipated. Intrigue coils in your stomach, but you can’t fight the way he unsettles you.

He’s been arrested. The news anchor’s voice carries the weight of the revelation, the story intensifying with every word. After years on the run, the law has finally caught up with him. Ghost—a ghost no longer—is now locked away in the High-Security Unit of Belmarsh, one of southeast London’s most formidable prisons, home to terrorists, murderers, and just the worst of the worst.

You stare at the screen, the words sinking in as you take another slow bite of your PB&J. There’s a strange sort of chill that runs through you, not from familiarity but from the sheer presence of the large man on the screen, as if he’s in the very room you’re sitting in. The news anchor’s voice drones on, but you’re already lost in thought.

You think back to Vets Club, remembering how the club would sometimes send letters to other people—petty criminals who were locked up for minor counts of drug possession, vandalism, or shoplifting. Stupid shit. At first, it seemed odd, but the more you thought about it, the more it made sense. Why not offer a little kindness to anyone that needs a pick-me-up? They didn’t have to be war heroes. 

As long as they didn’t kill anyone—or anything. 

So just like the veterans, you guys would send letters. And just like the veterans, you'd sometimes get a reply, a genuine thank you, as if the fact that someone cared enough to reach out made a difference. It was just about being human, about showing some kindness when so much of the world felt cold.

You never wrote to someone like Ghost before. Not someone so... bad. Not someone whose reputation is so undeniably, explicitly rotten. Someone who, many would argue, is explicitly undeserving of such kindness. 

You snap back to reality, and his figure dominates the screen—broad shoulders, large muscles even under the clothing, the kind of man who demands attention.  The CCTV footage is grainy, a mere screen capture from a longer video plastered on the TV for your viewing pleasure

His face is masked with a skull-patterned balaclava, the fabric stretched taut over his facial features, distorting the skeletal design just enough to make it seem like the grinning visage is shifting with every movement, angular lines that give him an almost inhuman quality—like a wraith lurking in the dark. 

He’s swathed in black from head to toe, the fabric of his dark jacket and and even darker pants absorbing the dim light, making him one with the shadows that cling to every surface around him. Each step is silent, calculated, his presence more of a feeling than a sight—an omen in the periphery, waiting.

It’s strangely captivating, the way he looms, the way the static buzz of the television makes it feel like he could crawl through the screen at any second, like that stupid Ring movie. You sort of wish he would. 

His image lingers, burned into the LEDs of your TV, burned into your mind. You’re not sure why it catches you the way it does, but you can’t look away. Something about him—his sheer presence, even through a screen—snags at your curiosity like a loose thread begging to be pulled, a sweater unfurled into a heap of yarn. God you’re so lonely.

Your mind drifts as your fingers move almost instinctively. A few quick Google searches lead you down a steep rabbit hole, a litany of news reports covering crimes that stretch back years. No one has seemed to figure out his real name, no verifiable background. Alleged military ties, some say, possibly ex-special forces. Others insist he was born into the criminal underworld, raised by it, shaped by it, an enforcer forged in violence.

Though nothing could be determined for sure, most of the reports agree on one thing for certain: he was methodical, precise, and had an undeniable dedication and passion for his craft. You presumed that’s what made him a terrorist-level threat.

Then you stumble upon another fact—and you pause. Belmarsh Prison, his current home, isn’t even that far. Just a thirty-minute drive from your flat.

That should be alarming, but the thought sinks in your mind like a stone dropped into a well. For a second, the dull, predictable rhythm of your life feels disrupted—a ripple in reality, as if you've slipped into some parallel version of your life, one that isn’t just last night’s leftovers and tomorrow's 10-hour shift.

For the first time in a long while, you feel a flicker of excitement. It makes your life feel a little less dull, like something unexpected, something outside the ordinary routine, has just entered your world. Maybe you could write him a letter—

—No. What the fuck? That’s insane. He’s killed people, and you want to send him a letter? 

…

You decide to send him a letter. 

It’s not like you’re his number one fan—or a fan at all, for that matter. Plus, the chances of him even reading it are slim to none, he’s probably buried under piles of letters that sound just like the ones you used to write, if not worse.

It’s just a letter. You’re not looking for anything in return. You’ll write to him, then move on, because why not? It’s not about trying to change him or sympathizing with him, it’s just... kindness. 

Your half-eaten sandwich is abandoned on the coffee table, forgotten the moment the thought takes root. You push yourself up from the couch. The floor is cold beneath your feet as you move down the narrow hall and toward your bedroom, each step fueled by something you don’t care to name—excitement, recklessness, boredom, maybe all three twisted together.

Your bedroom is dim and poorly lit by your bedside lamp. The air feels alive, the window cracked open, allowing the evening breeze to slip through and blow through the room. The curtains sway with it, shifting shadows across the walls, fleeting and fluid, much like the thoughts in mind.

You reach for an old journal tucked away in your bedside table, its spine softened by years of thumbing through its pages. The cover, once smooth, is now rough with wear, smudged with time and old ink stains. As you flip through, the pages crackle—thin, fragile things filled with half-formed ideas and late-night ramblings from high school.

You find a blank page and grab a pen from the bedside table, its weight familiar, and grounding, and shift into a cross-legged seat on your bed. The mattress dips beneath you, the duvet stretching with the movement. 

For a moment, you hesitate. What do you even say to someone like him? 

You reason with yourself that if he’s unlikely to even read the letter, then it doesn’t matter. You don’t expect anything to come of it, but the thought of sending a message feels like the most fun you’ve had in years.

You press the pen to the paper. 

‘Dear Big Bad Ghost,’ 

A quiet giggle escapes you at that, the kind that bubbles up when you know you’re doing something absolutely stupid. But really, what’s the harm? You have nothing to lose, no reputation at stake, and no consequences beyond a letter that will likely end up thrown in a trashcan. You might as well have some fun with it. A little tongue-in-cheek humor never hurt anyone.

Your pen glides across the paper, words spilling faster than you can second-guess them. You tell him how you found out about him, how you saw his face flash across your TV screen, how his name is spoken like an urban legend on the news channels. And—because there’s no point in pretending otherwise—you admit the truth outright: you thought he was hot, because—let’s be honest—you wouldn’t be doing something this rash if he wasn’t (you make sure to write that, too).

You just keep going. You tell him you’re 24, impossibly lonely and still a virgin, stuck working at Tesco with the worst coworkers possible, with little excitement in your life. You’re sure you’ve painted yourself as painfully average, definitely the most boring woman on the planet, though you wonder if that in itself might intrigue him. Or maybe he won’t care at all. Either way, the words are already there, ink drying on the page.

You tell him that if this were happening back in the States, they’d have slapped him with a RICO charge so fast he’d get whiplash—but lucky for him, he’s dealing with the UK’s legal system instead. A small mercy, though not much of one.

Your pen barely lifts from the paper as you continue. If he ever gets out, you tell him, your door is open for a ‘good time’. You underline it for emphasis, like a wink through the page, though you’re quick to add that, realistically, you’re sure he’ll be locked up for life.

Still, you suppose, even the worst criminals must get bored. Maybe he’ll want a pen pal to entertain him for the rest of his days.

You sit back, tapping the pen against your chin as you reread the letter. It’s ridiculous, a tad insane, but the thrill of it makes your stomach buzz. Some prison guard will probably skim it, roll their eyes, and toss it straight into the bin.

But still…

 You scrawl your name at the bottom and the moment the ink dries, you tear the page from your journal, fold it neatly, and slide it into an envelope. You write your address in the return section. Just in case. Your fingers hesitate at the edge, but before second thoughts can creep in, you lick the edges, the bitter taste making you wince and seal it shut.

Next thing you know, you’re sliding on some slippers, unlocking the front door, and stepping into the cool night air. The mailbox is just a few paces from your front door. The world has gone to sleep for tonight.

You reach the rusted blue box, heart hammering as you pull open the slot. The envelope feels heavier now like it carries more weight than it should. You hover there for a second longer than necessary, gripping the paper between your fingers.

And then you let it go. It’s chilling how easy it is. 

The past two weeks have passed in a blur of work, exhaustion, and the crushing weight of an uninspired routine. You’ve long since moved on from the letter. You’ve nearly forgotten about it entirely. Life doesn’t give you much room to dwell on dumb things like that—not when you spend your days dodging entitled customers and biting back the urge to commit minor acts of violence in the break room.

Today was particularly brutal. Some guy spent ten minutes arguing with you over a 5 quid price difference like it was a matter of life and death. A toddler managed to knock over an entire display of crisps while her mom scrolled through Instagram, blissfully unaware. By the time your shift ended, you felt like you’d been put through a meat grinder and then asked to clock out with a smile.

Rush hour on the train only adds insult to injury. Someone sneezes directly onto the back of your neck. Another person else eats an offensively pungent egg sandwich within arm’s reach. You spend the entire ride back gripping the overhead rail and wondering why you ever thought adulthood would be anything more than a slow, soul-draining trudge toward the grave.

By the time you finally get home, your body aches with exhaustion that seeps into your bones. You kick off your shoes, chuck your bag onto the floor, and drag yourself toward the kitchen. There’s no energy left in you for cooking, so you grab some leftover takeout from the fridge and toss it into the microwave, staring blankly at the rotating container as it whirs to life. No, it’s not the same takeout from two weeks ago. 

You settle onto the couch with your dinner, flicking through the limited selection of channels. With an eye roll, you settle on the news once more, just as a reporter’s voice cuts in, crisp and professional.

At first, you’re barely paying attention, too focused on shoveling lukewarm noodles into your mouth. But then—

BREAKING NEWS: MASS PRISON RIOT ENSUES AT BELMARSH – GHOST AT LARGE

The bold red banner streaks across the screen, sharp and urgent. Your fork stalls midway to your mouth, noodles slipping off the prongs and back into the container as your brain struggles to catch up.

The news anchor doesn’t miss a beat, her voice steady, polished, and edged with just the right amount of alarm:

“Authorities have confirmed a large-scale riot at Belmarsh Prison earlier this evening, resulting in multiple casualties and the escape of several high-profile inmates—including ‘Ghost’, who was awaiting trial for dozens of indictable offenses.”

Your stomach tightens.

Ghost might be on your doorstep and London might look like Gotham, all before dawn even breaks tomorrow.

For a moment, you simply sit there, absorbing the weight of it. You should probably be more concerned. Probably get up, lock the doors, check your windows, and maybe even send a half-hearted text to your parents that, no, you haven’t been stabbed or kidnapped yet. 

After a few more seconds you wisen up, mentally slapping yourself. Super-Mega-Criminal-Ghost has bigger problems than tracking down a random girl who sent him one dumb letter out of the hundreds you’re sure he’s gotten. You’re not special. You’re not even remotely relevant in this situation.

Your eyes lock onto the screen as aerial footage of Belmarsh fills the frame. The prison looks like something out of a videogame—thick plumes of smoke curling into the night sky, roaring flames illuminating figures in riot gear as they swarm the perimeter, floodlights sweeping across the wreckage of what was, until hours ago, one of the most secure facilities in the country. Sirens wail in the background.

Somewhere in that chaos, a man you sent a letter to—that more closely resembled a dating profile— has vanished into thin air.

You exhale, exhausted and too tired to brood on it further. Even if he did show up and break down your door, you’re sure your life couldn’t get worse, so you decide to ignore the news and reach for the remote. With a press of a button, the world of reports and fear-mongering headlines is cut off and replaced by the manufactured warmth of a sitcom.

The studio audience laughs on cue.

You force yourself to eat, to go through the motions. Take small, measured bites, as if chewing will somehow settle the restless feeling creeping up your spine. 

It doesn’t. 

When you finish the sad lump of noodles, you head to the kitchen. Dishes clink as you rinse them, your mind half-present as your body moves on autopilot. 

By the time you’ve cleaned up, the tension in your body has quieted. You tell yourself it’s fine. You’re fine. It’s just another night with one more thing to add to the ever-growing list of reasons why this city is exhausting.

You make your way to the bathroom with a sigh, shutting the door behind you. The day clings to your skin, heavy and lingering, but the promise of hot water is enough to shake off the worst of it.

You twist the shower knob. Pipes groan, then sputter, before a steady stream rushes out. You strip down, kicking your dirty clothes into the corner as steam billows, curling against the mirror until your reflection blurs.

After testing the water with your hand, you step in, a sharp inhale slipping past your lips as the warmth crashes over you. It seeps into your muscles, loosening tension you hadn’t even realized you were still holding. You tilt your head back, eyes fluttering shut as you let it pour over you.

Your body moves through the motions on autopilot. Shampoo, scrubbed into your scalp. Conditioner, combed through the ends with your fingers. The buy-one-get-one soap glides over your skin, the scent of cheap vanilla and pomegranate thick in the humid air, mingling with the steam that cocoons you. You carefully shave where necessary before the water washes everything away.

You finish your shower, stepping out into the warm fog of steam clinging to the bathroom walls. You take your towel off the hook and drag it over your skin, patting your hair just enough to keep it from dripping but not enough to fully dry it. 

Right now, all you want is to crawl into bed and pretend this night is just like any other, despite the very real fact that the London Bridge might actually go down overnight.

You don’t bother wrapping the towel around yourself. There’s no point. It’s just you here—always, unfortunately, just you. As much as you wish that wasn’t the case, there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.

Pushing open the bathroom door, steam rushes past you, rolling into the hallway like a ghost of its own. The air is cooler than usual, biting at your damp skin. A shiver rolls through you, goosebumps prickling to life as you clutch the towel tighter around yourself.

You move quickly, bare feet padding against the floor, the cool air chasing you down the hall. You shake it off, the shower was especially hot today, after all. 

Once inside your bedroom, you flick on the small lamp on your bedside table. The weak glow struggles against the shadows, barely illuminating the room beyond a soft, feeble pool of light. You sigh, staring at it for a moment. You really should invest in another one, something stronger, something that does its job—but the thought of subjecting yourself to the blinding glare of overhead lighting is unbearable.

The usual cool breeze from the window rolls in and whisks against your skin as you stand in front of the large mirror sitting atop your dresser, as naked as the day you were born. You absentmindedly rub lotion onto your arms and legs, the smooth cream sinking into your skin with satisfying ease, a small act of self-care amidst the shit-show of your life. You swipe on some deodorant, a miscellaneous powdery scent briefly masking the other smells that linger in your room.

You pull open the top drawer, fingers brushing past folded fabric until you find a pair of plain black no-show panties. The material is soft between your fingertips.

You hook your thumbs into the waistband, bending slightly as you slide the fabric up your legs, smooth against your skin. It settles high on your hips, snug and familiar.

But as you straighten,  the air feels different.

Your breath stalls, a tight, involuntary hitch in your throat. A prickle skates down your spine, the hairs on the back of your neck rising, your body sensing the shift before your mind can grasp it. Then comes the scent. Subtle quickly shifts to suffocating. 

Ash, woody and bitter like a lonely bonfire.

Gunpowder, metallic and pungent like a shrill war cry.

And beneath it all, something brutally masculine. Utterly tart, like blood welling on your tongue, bitter, metallic, yet impossible to spit out so you’re forced to swallow.

You’re still facing the mirror, bare skin gleaming under the dim light, damp where the shower’s heat still lingers. Your reflection is all soft curves and slow, steady breaths, the delicate contrast of black fabric against your skin.

But you’re not looking at yourself anymore.

Your eyes are locked onto something else. Someone else.

Over your right shoulder, a hulking figure sits backward in your desk chair, big, long legs spread on either side, the heavy, shadowy outline of him filling the space behind you. His presence is so sudden, so jarring, that it takes you a moment to even process it. From what you can make out, he is facing you,  arms crossed over the backrest like he owns the room.

You’re frozen, trapped in your own body, your mind a tangled mess of confusion and fear. You scramble to process how this could even be happening. Your eyes dart to the window over your left shoulder in the reflection, the wind howling on cue as if to mock you. 

Your window is violently wrenched ajar, and suddenly, the drop in temperature makes sense. That’s what you felt earlier—the sudden chill that wrapped around you the second you stepped out of the bathroom. How you didn’t feel it moments ago is beyond you.

Your heart pounds in your ears, a brutal thundering that mutes the voice in your head telling you to run, single-handedly hijacking every morsel of reason you possess. Each beat is so violent, that you think you can feel your ribs splintering, cracking to make room.

You can’t help but stare at yourself, standing there, exposed and utterly vulnerable, tits perked and on display like it’s time for Sunday dinner. But it’s impossible to make yourself move. Your feet feel like cinder blocks.

Your eyes flick back to him.

He hasn’t moved. Not an inch. A statue of flesh and shadow, his towering frame swallowing the space behind you. Your breath stutters as your gaze collides with his—an accident, a mistake. Dark eyes, barely visible, catch the light as he leans in, closer, closer still.

You regret it instantly. Your stomach flips, twisting in on itself as something molten ignites deep inside you. Butterflies—you’re sure—but they feel wrong, tainted, clawing their way up your throat, wings drenched in bile, desperate to break free.

He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t even breathe.

Just silen—

“Shouldn’t’ve given a dog a bone, Girl.”

Oh.

Oh.

Shit.

You swallow, the motion sharp and dry, as your eyes fixate on the sliver of him that the mirror allows you to see. Your tongue feels like it’s too big for your mouth, thick and clumsy, but it's not just that—it’s as though it’s been wrung dry like you’ve forgotten how to speak, how to make any sound at all.

Could be fight, could be flight—or could be sheer, reckless stupidity. Superficial courage floods your veins, burning hot and impulsive. You don’t know where it comes from, only that it’s there, forcing you to turn, to face him, not through the mirror’s reflection but for real, head-on. Your body obeys even as your mind screams to stop, to run, to do anything but face the giant sitting in the chair behind you. It must be adrenaline. 

You pivot, and the room changes. It warps.

He fills the room—dominates it—far more than four walls should ever allow, and far more than your traitorous mirror portrayed. His frame is more ape than human, more God than man, every inch of him radiating undomesticated power that seems to bend the very air around him like a mirage.

He’s dressed in grey, prison-issued sweatpants, the soft fabric taut over his thick, spread thighs. A matching grey sweatshirt is tied around his waist, a small, white wife-beater stretched across his chest. The fabric strains against the thickness of his body, pecs beneath like boulders, barely contained by the threadbare material. The shirt looks as though it might snap under the sheer pressure of him.

It almost seems pointless for him to wear it.

A sick part of you wishes he didn’t.

Around his neck, a set of dog tags dangles, the metal catching the light as it sways in rhythm with his slow, steady breaths. His arms are a canvas of dark ink—twisting amalgamations of war and death, flames and ruin etched into his skin. The same balaclava you’ve seen on your screen stretches over his face, but it feels even more menacing now.

His eyes—dark brown, nearly black—burn as they lock onto you. There’s an eerie glow to them, a depth that makes your stomach twist. You can barely make out their full shape, but you feel the weight of his gaze, the way it maps your body with an intensity that singes. He’s memorizing you, branding you into his mind, scorching every visible inch of your skin just by looking.

Which, right now, is essentially all of it.

It’s suffocating, and overwhelming. The space around you seems to shrink, the walls pressing inward, forcing you to feel the heft of his presence. Your bubble, your safe little world, vanishes, replaced by the oppressive weight of him, his sheer size and power making the room feel like a part of a dollhouse, too small to contain him. Every breath feels harder to take like you’re drowning, and he’s the rip current that dragged you out from shore and pushed you under.

And then, as if sensing your every thought, as if aware of your discomfort and your disbelief, he shifts. Just a subtle movement at first. But a shift is all it takes before he’s not sitting anymore.

Your breath catches in your throat, as he slowly rises from the chair, taking up even more of the room, shadow growing longer in his wake, his muscles rippling in the lamplight. He doesn’t rush. No, there’s no need. He moves, each large step bringing him closer to you.

All that ‘courage’ drained. You never thought you’d be the frozen-in-fear type, but here you are, your body stiff and uncooperative as you look up at him. Your neck cranes back further and further, unwillingly following as he stalks toward you, each step near imperceptible to the ear. At least you know why you didn’t hear him come in.

You’re backed flush against your dresser, your breath coming in shallow gasps, your chest tight with panic, but you can’t look away. You don’t even know if you want to. There’s a strange magnetism to him, something almost predatory in the way he moves, so controlled, so sure. 

It’s addicting.

Your thighs clench together at the internal acceptance, a small attempt at some kind of control over the sick part of your brain that’s turned on by this.

“Quiet little thing.” His voice is low, gravelly like it’s been rubbed raw, but there’s a hint of amusement in it, a wicked edge that makes your skin prickle and your cunt gush. He takes another step closer, a mere foot away, the distance between you is agonizing. “Glad you’re not a screamer.”

He pauses just in front of you, towering over you. The weight of his gaze chokes you like a noose. He doesn’t miss when your thighs clench. You could have sworn you saw the flicker of a smile beneath the balaclava, though it’s hard to tell.

“I’m not gonna bite, Girl,” he tuts, “unless y’want me to.”

The way he says it—so carnivorously—sends a jolt of electricity down your spine, a hot flush of pure shame of pooling low in your stomach. You're still frozen, unsure whether you should respond, run, or drop to your knees. 

“Y’sent me a letter,” he continues, his voice softening just slightly as his eyes flick to your tits like he’s checking out a new appliance.

 “Tellin’ me all about your boring little life,” He steps even closer, “And that sweet little cunt, untouched like you want me t’make it mine.”

You try to speak, but only your mouth moves, your vocal cords too dry, too hoarse, and your throat constricted. He notices. The slight twitch of his lips like he’s enjoying how utterly speechless you are, how dumb you look.

“Y’want me t’make it mine? Hmm? That why you gave a ‘Big Bad’ man your address?”

You swallow in an attempt to lubricate your throat, but it’s futile. Is this what you were subconsciously hoping for when you wrote down which street you lived on and your apartment number? Did you want this? Were you that lonely—that desperate?

“Can y’imagine how hard I came,” he leans over you, his breath hot against your ear, you feel it through the mask, “How I rubbed my cock raw to the thought of some dumb virgin with the audacity of a dozen slags?”

Yeah. You were that desperate. 

You nearly whimper at the way he talks to you. You finally manage to take a breath, your voice barely more than a whisper. “I— I didn’t think you’d—”

He cocks his head slightly as if considering your words “What? Didn’t think I’d show?” he repeats, dragging the words out slowly, a smirk curling at the edges of his lips as if he’s savoring the mockery in them. “You invited me here. It’d be rude to reject such a generous offer.”

You bite back a scoff. As if he’s so gracious, breaking into your house and cornering you while you’re naked. Talk about audacity.

“Go fuck yourself.” 

“I have,” he shoots back, shrugging almost imperceptibly as his hands find your hips, tracing the fabric of your panties, eyes darkening at the way your mons dimples beneath his thumbs. “Won’t be as good as her.”

Your pulse spikes, a mix of anger and something darker curling in your chest. You should shove him away, scream at him to get out, but his hands are so warm when they hold you. The proximity of his body has you paralyzed, his hands still firm on your hips, as if to remind you that he can have his way with you at a moment’s notice.

You open your mouth to speak, but his hand moves higher, wrapping around your waist, while the other slides down to grip your ass, pulling you against him with a force that leaves no space between your bodies. The words die in your throat as your tits collide with his stomach and your cheek presses into his chest, the hard beat of his heart thudding beneath your ear, as he holds you there, pinning you in some weird, bone-crushing hug. 

He smells like soap and something musky and everything you’d expect a fugitive to smell like, like cigarette ash and a smidge of gunpowder. It makes your pulse stutter, like a drug you didn’t know you were addicted to. You can’t help but melt into his strong frame despite your brain screaming at you to push him away.

“Y’feel that, sweetheart?” he hums, his hand kneading the fat of your ass, pressing his bulge against your pelvis through his sweatpants.  “Ever felt a cock that big before?”

“Please,” you whisper, the plea a stark contrast to the defiance you try to muster. Your body trembles, a mix of fear and blistering heat. “Just... don't.”

He chuckles, a low, mocking sound. “Don't what, sweetheart?” he murmurs, his fingers rising from your ass to trace the delicate line of your throat. “Don't touch you? Don't remind you of what y’are?”

He tips your head up to his as you flinch at his words, the truth of them cutting deeper than any physical blow. “I…” you stammer, faltering as you meet his dark hazel eyes. 

“Virgin,” he deadpans as he grips your chin between his digits, “Y’terrified. It's written all over your face, baby” He coos condescendingly, eyes scanning your body, lingering on the cute flush in your cheeks, “Curious, too, aren't you? Wondering what it would be like.”

You swallow hard, eyes flicking away from his. “No,” you lie, the denial weak and utterly unconvincing.

He lets out a low, exasperated grunt, like you’re testing his patience, like this is tedious for him. And then, without warning, his hands clamp around your thighs, lifting you effortlessly before settling you atop the dresser. His grip is firm as he pushes your legs apart, spreading them as far as they’ll go to make room for himself. The wood is cold against your skin, a stark contrast to the heat radiating from him, from the rough drag of his palms as they find purchase on the soft flesh of your thighs, from where he dips his head to your throat. 

“Don’t fuckin’ lie to me, sweetheart,” You don’t know when he pulled his mask up, but you can feel his canines graze against your jugular, making you wince. He crowds your space, forcing you to tilt back until you’re leaning against the mirror, until there’s nowhere to go. You can feel his lips twitch against the skin of your neck, the ghost of a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.

“I can smell your cunt.” He licks a fat, hot stripe from your collarbone, past your jaw, and to your cheek, all before growling in your ear, “She’s droolin’ f’me, ain’t she? Gonna give me a taste o' her?”

Your eyebrows knit at the feel of his tongue slobbering all over you. Your breath hitches, and you can’t help but tremble. You can feel your panties sticking to your folds, but you’ve never been this wet before.  “I... I don't know,” you whimpered, overwhelmed by everything he was making you feel.

“Don't know? Please,” he scoffs, his voice thick with disdain. Without any hesitation, both of his hands find the gusset of your panties, balling them before ripping them in half. You yelp as they fall and settle against the dresser top. “Awh. Look at that,” he gets to his knees, thumbs spreading your glistening folds. “She's leakin’ onto my hand." He chuckles as he stares at the dampness between your legs. 

He lunges forward, his mouth latching to your pussy like it promised him a million dollars. A strangled moan rips through you as his tongue swirls and plunges into your weeping hole, mimicking the thrusts he intends to deliver later. He laps and nips, teeth gently but fervently grazing your clit, sending shivers of both pleasure and terror through your body.

Your head jerks back, waves of pleasure that have you gasping for air. His tongue works you in ways that should be illegal. You cling to the edge of the dresser, your knuckles turning white as he buries his face in you. You peer down at him as he eats you, his mask pulled over his nose.

“Whinin’ already?” he growls, his voice muffled against your cunt. He sucks harder, reveling in the way you arch your back and press your hips into his face. “Like a bitch in heat.” Your hands find his head and he suckles at your clit harder, eliciting a string of please, please, please’s from you. 

“Beg for it,” he commands, “Beg to come on m’tongue, baby.” 

“Yes,” you choked out in a gasp, the word a desperate plea lost in a wave of overwhelming sensation. Your body thrums with frantic energy, every nerve ending firing in a symphony as you desperately claw at his balaclava, nearly smothering him. “Please,” you beg, your voice thick with need. “Please, I— ‘m—”

He pulls away from you, gasping for air. His eyes find yours and he lands a firm slap to your cunt, making you jolt. “Tell me,” he hisses. “Tell me y’want to come for me.”

“I... I want to,” you gasped, your body trembling on the verge of collapse. “I wanna come for you, Ghost— Please—.”

“Good fuckin’ whore,” he slaps your cunt again, before diving back in, his hot tongue carding through your folds. He slips his ring and middle finger into your hole and you wail as he massages your g-spot. He slobbers on your clit, wet squelches echoing through the room as you feel the coil tightening in your belly. “Come, let me taste this slutty fuckin’ pussy.”

A strangled cry rips through you as the pleasure reaches its peak, a blinding wave of sensation that absolutely shatters your control. You convulse around him and he has to hold you still, pinning your hips down as your muscles clench and release in a series of involuntary spasms that make up the best orgasm of your life. Hot, thick spurts of cum flood his mouth as you croak out a broken string of curses and moans.  

He laps at you unhurriedly, savoring the taste, the feel of your release coating his tongue. “Fuck,” he moans, his voice rough with satisfaction. He pulls back, lips and chin glistening, and looks up at you with a smirk. “Love you virgins. Come so easily.”

Heat surges up your neck, pooling in your cheeks—a traitorous flush of shame that only worsens when you try to press your legs together. You didn’t think it would affect you like this, didn’t think you’d feel a spark of something twisted at being called the most horrific of names.

Your gaze darts away from his, unable to withstand the weight of it. Your hands move on instinct, a feeble attempt to shield yourself, to reclaim some sense of control. “Stop staring,” you whisper, not used to having eyes on you. But even to your own ears, it sounds weak—like a plea rather than a command.

He chuckles, a low, mocking sound as he rises to his feet, pressing his massive bulge against your bare cunt. “Stop what? Admiring my handiwork?” He reaches out, his fingers tracing the curve of your cheek before harshly squishing them between his index and thumb, your lips puckering.  “Don't be shy, sweetheart. You should feel lucky. Could’ve ruined this pretty fuckin’ mouth instead.”

You bite your lip at the thought of taking him in your mouth, stretching your throat and making you gag. He was so big, would stretch your pussy so good and you know it. He could give you what you’ve been wanting, what you’ve been needing. Tears prickle your eyes as you recover from your orgasm. “Just... fuck me, Please…?” you hum, unsure..

He grins, briefly flashing his teeth in the dim light. “Eager, are we?” He straightens, pulling you by your knees to stand on your feet. “Don't worry. Got more in store for you.”

He hauls you off of your dresser and toward your bed without much effort. Your legs feel like jelly and you trip over yourself, falling back onto the mattress, your body bouncing with the impact. He chuckles as he moves toward you, looming over you, his eyes burning with lust at the sight of you all spread out beneath him.

He reaches for the hem of his wife beater and pulls it over his head, tossing it aside without care, not bothering to take off his balaclava. You drag your gaze over his broad torso, taking in every inch as he stands before you. His muscles shift beneath scarred skin, every ridge and plane carved by years of violence you can’t even begin to imagine. Scars that have scars, bright pink wounds closed over. His dog tags rest between his pecs, gleaming dully against the heat of him. 

Your eyes trail lower, catching on the unmistakable wet patch darkening his sweatpants, a frighteningly long outline of his hard cock to accompany it. He watches you closely as your gaze traces the contours of his body, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. 

"Like what you see, Girl?" His voice is low, thick with a dark amusement. It’s rhetorical, he knows you do. Without breaking eye contact, he slides his fingers into the waistband of his sweatpants and pulls them down, revealing his length with a singular motion.

No underwear. A Right dog, he is. 

Your breath hitches, a gasp trapped in your throat as you take in the full view. His cock is thick and heavy. A brutal, veined length that periodically twitches every time his gaze drops to your sodden cunt. A thatch of dark, dirty blonde hair frames its base, leading up to his navel. The uncircumcised head glistens in the lamplight, a single drop of pre drooling from his tip. You wish you could flick your tongue against it, gulping down every ounce of his slick he’d be willing to let you swallow.

“What’d y’want?”

You can't form the words, your mind blank, throat tight with a mix of fear and anticipation, the air heavy with implicit tension and the scent of sex.

How could he even fit inside of you?

You just dumbly nod in response to whatever he said. Meek, almost imperceptible.

He tuts, “Noddin’ ain’t enough, sweets,” he growled. “You’re a big girl, ain’t you?

“I…” you stammer, your cheeks burning with shame at saying something so lewd out loud. “I want…”

“Say it,” he taunts as he takes his cock in his hands, pumping slowly. His voice is like thunder, a low, dangerous rumble. “Say y’want this cock.”

“I... I want your cock,” you whisper, the words barely audible. You’re too focused on the way his pre drips onto your spread pussy.

“Louder,” he demands, landing a firm slap against your clit. “Can't hear you.”

“I want your cock,” you enunciated, your voice a little stronger this time.

“Louder, y’fuckin’ slag—”

“I want your fucking cock!” you shout, the words echoing through the room.

He shrugs and a satisfied smirk spreads across his face. “Geez, all y’had to do was ask.” 

You could slap him. 

He positions himself between your legs, the bed dipping as he crawls closer to you. He takes your thighs in his hands, pressing them up to your chest. His knees dimple the duvet on either side of your hips, the ruddy head of his cock tracing the puffy folds of your entrance. Each time his tip grazes your clit, a tremor runs through your body.

“So fuckin’ sensitive,” he groans, “So wet f’me, too, Christ.”

He presses forward, your pussy stretching taut over his mushroomed tip. You wince, your eyebrows knitting in pain. He was huge, impossibly thick, and the feeling of him pushing against your sensitive flesh was both terrifying and exhilarating.

“Gonna split this cunny in half, girl,” he winces as you pulse around him. He draws tight circles on your clit and you’re reeling, choking on your own gasps, “gonna feel me in y’fuckin’ throat.”

He pushes himself deeper, inch by agonizing inch until he sheaths himself inside of you completely. Tears stream down your face, a mixture of pain and pleasure overwhelming you. You cry out at the stretch, your body arching into his as your hands search for anything to steady yourself, settling on the hard plains of his back.

“Jesus baby, so tight,” he grunts, stalled inside of you as he tries not to blow his load. “So fucking tight.”

You slowly loosen around him as you adapt to his size, but the burn still has you lightheaded. You've never been so full in your life. Your nails claw into his back, leaving raw streaks and crescent-shaped marks on his scarred skin. “Fuck me,” you rasp, “Please, Ghost, fuck me.” Your hips buck involuntarily as you babble, desperate for more of him. 

He chuckles a low, guttural sound that you swear you can feel vibrating through your body. “Cock-drunk already, are we?” he taunts,  “Fuckin’ whore,” He pulls back slightly before plunging forward with renewed force, cramming his cock against your cervix, hitting places you couldn’t even reach with your own fingers.

He was right. You could feel him everywhere, stretching you, filling you, owning you, utterly consuming you. Every thrust punched the air out of you, the rhythmic plap, plap, plap of his thighs meeting yours reverberating through the room as he fucked you.

“Fuck me harder, I need you— please—” You were so close already, worked up from your last orgasm and already teetering on the edge of another, the pleasure building each time the head of his cock strokes your g-spot. He picks up the pace with a groan and hammers into you, unable to breathe as his cock stretches you to your limits.

 “Ghost,” you sob, fat tears falling from your eyes, wetting your cheeks before you can stop them. His name escapes your lips through hiccups, unable to think of anything except how full you feel, how you could’ve possibly missed out on this for so long. 

He slaps your cheek, the sting is a sudden shock that jolts you back to the present. “Stop fuckin’ callin’ me that,” he snarls, his voice thick with pure sex and an edge of possessiveness, just lurking beneath his words. He leans directly over you, your legs pinned between his torso and yours. He groans before  shrugging up his balaclava and licking your stray tears. You’re too deep in it to fully process, too consumed by the heat of the moment to care.

“Call me Simon when I fuck you,” he rasps against your lips,

“Say it.”

“S—Sim—on,” you mewl, your voice punctuated by each of his thrusts. “S—simon, p—ple—ase…”

“Please what?” he snarls, the head of his cock devastatingly rubbing your g-spot with each thrust, “Please fuck you harder? Please make you cream all over this cock?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” you wail, your body writhing beneath him. “Please, Simon— Fuck!”

“Atta fuckin’ girl,” he praises through gritted teeth, and with renewed vigor, he fucks you harder,  caging you in as he fucks you into the mattress, each stroke shoving you farther up the bed.

“Squeezin’ me so tight,” he rasps, “So fucking tight.” he gripped your thighs harder, the fat dimpling beneath his fingers, surely to bruise in the morning. He presses you further, painfully folded in half. “Feel me? Feel how deep I am inside o’ you?”

You gasp, your body trembling, heat pooling low in your belly, sparks shooting up your spine, “Yes,” you breathed, your voice a strained whisper. “Too much... it's so much, Si—”

You’re on the edge, pressure just building and tightening as your walls pulse around him, ready to milk him for all he’s worth. His hips stutter and he knows he’s done for. “Fuck, let go, Let it happen, pet,”

At his command, a raw, guttural cry tears from your throat, and a shattered echo of his name launches into the humid air. It isn’t much of a word, not really, but a primal sound, a desperate, broken exclamation born from the white-hot core of your pleasure. 

Your back arches, lifting you off the bed, your spine a rigid curve against his. Your hips buck wildly against his, grinding and shuddering. The hot, slick rush of your release coats his cock. It spreads across his abdomen and your thighs as well, a glistening sheen in the dim light. Your breath hitches and ragged gasps escape your lips as the waves of pleasure wash over you. 

The world narrows, focusing solely on the feel of his skin on your own as he still thrusts into you, telling you to  “Cream this fuckin’ cock,” as he groans, just as lost in the pleasure as you. The aftershocks of your orgasm reverberate through you, leaving you trembling and weak as he fucks you through it to reach his own. 

A series of breathy moans escape his lips in tandem with yours, each one a ragged exhale as his hips begin to twitch, thrusts growing sloppy as you pulse around him, energy rippling through his muscles as his own orgasm approaches.

 “Oh-,” he breathes, his voice a low, jagged rasp, a guttural urging. “Fuck! Fuck— Shit, just like that, girl.” His hips slam against yours, a final, desperate thrust that presses him flush against your cunt. He spills inside you, a hot, thick tide of his cum flooding your cunt. Ropes of his seed paint your inner walls, as far as he can reach, marking you as his. A wave of heat pulses through you, the feeling of him filling you completely, claiming you from the inside out.

Eventually, the tremors die down, and he rolls off you, the sudden absence of his weight pinning you down leaving you feeling strangely hollow. Your thighs fall limply as he lets go of them, a strange ache that almost bothers you.

A low chuckle rumbles in his chest, a sound of contentment. 

“Broken little bird aren’t you?” he drawls.. 

You lift your head to see him eye-level with your pussy, watching as his cum leaks out of you. You lay still, your body aching, your mind spinning. You want to protest, to deny his words and shut your legs, but you don’t think you could form a genuine sentence if you tried. 

Not only did you (finally) lose your virginity, but you lost it to a criminal. That broke into your house. 

He moves to sit next to your laid figure and reaches out, his fingers tracing the delicate curve of your jaw, his touch surprisingly gentle. “Don't look so glum, sweetheart,” he murmurs, his voice softening slightly. “You did well,”

“for a first-timer.”

A blush creeps up your neck, and you instinctively turn your face away, curling into yourself. “Shut up,” you mutter, your voice hoarse.

He lets out a low, husky chuckle. “Oh, usin’ fightin’ words now, are we?” His fingers find a stray strand of your hair, twisting it lazily between calloused fingertips. “Funny, didn’t see you puttin’ up much of a fight five minutes ag—”

You don’t let him finish. Grabbing a tousled pillow, you launch it at his face. It bounces off his head with a pathetic little thump. He snorts, catching it mid-air, the plush looking comically small in his massive hands.

“Oh, we’re throwin’ shit now?” He smirks, squeezing the poor thing for emphasis. “Little minx—”

The sudden blare of the doorbell slices through the moment. You both freeze.

His eyes flick toward the door, sharp and assessing, mood immediately changing. “You expectin’ anyone?”

You shake your head. “No.”

His jaw tightens. The weight of reality comes crashing back. He’s a fugitive, and did, in fact, break into your house.

“I’ll get it,” you hum, already moving.

He gives a slow nod, hungrily watching as you rummage through your dresser for something decent. You yank an oversized T-shirt over your head and grab the first pair of pants you can find, his sweats. They nearly slide right off your hips, the waistband hanging dangerously loose, but there’s no time to fix it.

You leave the bedroom, your pulse drumming in your ears as you make your way to the front door. The second you pull it open, your stomach drops.

Two cops.

Their faces are unreadable, their eyes scanning you, the dim space behind you, everything. “Evening, miss. Sorry to bother you, but we’re making the rounds,” one of them says, flashing a tight-lipped smile. “You seen anything suspicious? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Your fingers tighten around the doorframe. You think of Simon. His hands on your waist, the weight of him between your legs, the low rasp of his voice still ringing in your ears. But you swallow hard and shake your head.

“No, nothing,” you say, keeping your voice light, casual. “Why?”

The other officer exhales sharply, shifting his weight. “ Highly dangerous man on the loose. Escaped with the rest of those arseholes from Belmarsh. Last spotted in this area.” His gaze flicks past you again, scanning the dreary interior of your flat. “Figured we’d check in, see if anyone’s seen him.”

You school your face into something neutral, shaking your head again. “Haven’t seen anything lately, sorry to disappoint.”

They watch you for a second too long. You wonder if they can hear your heartbeat slamming against your ribs. But finally, they nod.

“All right. Just be careful, ma’am. Lock your doors.”

“Will do,” you say, forcing a tight-lipped smile of your own.

You shut the door.

Your heart is pounding. You press your back against the timber, exhaling sharply before pushing off and heading back to the bedroom.

“Simon—” you call, nudging the door open.

The bed is empty, sheets tangled, the ghost of his warmth already fading. The curtains billow, the night air slithering in, laced with the scent of him—sex, sweat, something else that’s so distinctly him.

He’s gone.

But ghosts always return to their haunt.

[dreamtofus]

in effect

pairing: joel miller x former f!sex worker!reader

wc: 7.8k

summary: Going it alone isn't easy.

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), female masturbation, trouble orgasming, dissociation, ptsd, angst, anxiety and spiraling thoughts, unhealthy coping methods, reader was a sex worker, mentions of sex work, internalized shame, self deprecation, guilt, emotional vulnerability, terrible horrible parents, mentions of poverty, reader has a bad trip (anxiety, shaking, sweating)

a/n: as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading! I'm sorry for what I've done to our girl, all will be fixed in time <3

You spend your twenty-fourth birthday alone. 

It’s not as bad as it could be, and it’s better than years past. Since you started college you’ve always worked on your birthday. Last year it had been spent in the library, unaware that Joel would reenter your life that very weekend, that pretty widower you never thought you’d see again.

It stings though, that this year it falls on a Friday. 

Had things turned out differently, maybe you would have spent it with Joel. 

But as it stands, things are as they are.

You’re alone. 

Your mother calls you in the morning and the call lasts less than a minute, your father’s voice echoing her sentiments from somewhere in the background, the once familiar sounds of the pair of them getting ready for work echoing down the line. 

Against your better judgement, you tell them that you’re graduating. Something tells you to leave out the doctoral candidacy. 

It’s been months since you spoke to them, and you had not seen them around the holidays, a brief call just like this one the only contact. 

“You’re still doing that?” Your mother says, coughing into the phone. You can picture the billowing cloud of cigarette smoke, the irritated wave of her hand, phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder. “Well, good. You can finally get out into the real world. Get fucking a job and stop wasting all your damn money.” 

She is the first person you’ve told, leaving out the most important details, and this is all you get. Beratement, bereavement that you aren’t better than you are. 

The sound of the screen door opening and closing reaches down the line, strangling you with silence, the sounds of morning in your childhood home fading. You should hang up, but you’re frozen. “And I hope you stopped with that other shit,” she scolds, her voice snapping like gunfire. “Whorin’ or whatever the fuck you thought you were doing. Those tuition statements stopped comin’ to the house so I thought you dropped out.” 

You had only changed your address with the school. She had never bothered to ask, about school, about what you were doing otherwise if you dropped out. She doesn’t ask how you’ve afforded it otherwise. 

You can only swallow and murmur, “No, I just—I figured it out.”

“Without—”

“Yeah,” you cut her off, not emotionally prepared to be repeatedly called a slut by your mother. “I made it work.” 

“Good. It was fucking disgraceful and I hope you know that. We didn’t raise you that way. We didn’t raise a whore.” She inhales again, long and slow. “Come visit us sometime. Come home when you get a chance.” 

She hangs up without saying goodbye, without wishing you a happy birthday again, without waiting for a reply. Neither of them had deigned to ask when your graduation will be, and you’re faced with the sudden reality that no one will be there.

You want to feel the ache of disappointment, of hurt, but it’s too familiar to sting anymore. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, been faced with before. You hadn’t really wanted them to be there, but for one shining moment it had seemed like someone might be. 

Joel had offered to attend, and that hurts more, because you had started to believe in him in a way you haven’t believed in your parents in a very long time.

The possibility that Joel might come had lit you from the inside, a warm glow turning you translucent, lighting you from the inside out, all your veins and soft parts showing through your skin. Even if you hadn’t ended up telling him your name and university and asked him to come, the knowledge that you could have and that he would have shown up, is enough.

You curl on the couch and let your phone fall out of your hand to bounce on the cushion and then tumble onto the floor. The white light of the tv flashes over your face and the lethargic splay of your tangled limbs beneath the thin blanket. 

No one is going to save you, no one is going to support you, and that has always been true. But for one fleeting, tantalizing moment, you let yourself believe you might not have to do it all alone, that someone would have your back, look out for you, protect you when necessary from shadows stalking the night. 

Bright morning sun peeks hesitantly through blinds, and you wish you could swat it away like an errant fly. 

A hollow feeling opens in your chest, the edges of it raw and irritated, soaked in vinegar and salt. Your eyes are dry and soft in your skull, pulsing with a dull ache that never seems to fade. It matches the tension headache pounding between your eyes, the nerve pain in the back of your neck from clenching your jaw so often and for so long.

The pain is a river that snakes between your ribs, tugs persistently at the tangled remains of your shredded heart. It’s unceasing, a flow that feels like it will never stop.

Try as you might to resist it, you’ve fallen between the rungs of another depressive spiral. A pathetic, meaningless tragedy that never seems to end, that carves out little craters inside you. How long should you grieve something that had not been real to begin with? 

Not at all, probably.  

It hadn’t been a relationship, it hadn’t been anything, apparently. 

Discarded like yesterday’s trash by a man you love. A tale as old as time, a warning you should have heeded. If you were stronger, better, you would have quit him months ago along with smoking. 

He’d be nothing but a memory you left behind, and a more pleasant one than this, used and discarded and violently unwanted. 

This, maybe, is the price of all your clawing and scratching and wanting. You get the thing you want, the life you want, at the cost of what you felt had been a burgeoning love, something delicate and fragile but real.

But Joel had proven himself worse than any other man you’d been with. At least you knew what to expect, at least you felt nothing for them. Joel had gained your trust, been unjustifiably kind to you, helped you in so many ways, just to break you, just to fuck you like he didn’t know you, like he’s always known you were worthless and easy. 

Part of you wonders if he’d just gotten bored of you, or found another girl to fuck. 

All those times you’d wished he would just hurt you, be rough with you, push your head down, make you contort yourself to his whims, rush back into you so intensely you have to take a moment to breathe deeply with your eyes closed, cold air brushing the anxiously sweaty skin at the back of your neck. You wish for it now more than anything, because you never would have felt anything for him. 

The day moves slowly, time slipping by in great white clouds, sunlight pawing desperately at your blinds, thin fingers poking between the slats, prodding at your body until you sigh and get up, blanket curling to the floor in a pathetic sloughing ribbon.

The pounding in your head only burrows deeper as you shuffle toward the bathroom, bathed in a sudden acid yellow from the ceiling light. You splash water on your face and get ready without meeting your eyes in the mirror, knowing you’ll just look tired and sallow.

It’s hard to look at yourself, anymore. You’d managed it for so long because you’d had to, to work. But now, all you feel is disgust and shame when you meet your own stare.

Unorganized thoughts darting beneath the surface of your mind as you go through the motions of your skin care, never fully taking shape. 

Love and disappointment and a self-loathing so intense it makes your chest heave with a silent self-critical half-sob. It’s dry and easy to swallow back down, to keep buried in the lining of your stomach where no one can see it. 

Shame lingers in your chest like an old friend, happily settling in, nesting down, tucking in for a long, long stay. You try not to let any of the half formed thoughts transform into musings about Joel, but he lingers in your mind like a wraith. 

He’s everywhere you look. How many evenings had you spent on the phone with him in your bathroom, cracked pink tiles and blue ceramic framing the picture of him propped in your medicine cabinet, on the side of your bathtub? 

It scares and sickens you to think of the nudes you sent him, with your fucking face in them. If he were angry enough, determined enough, he could find you and ruin you in a different way. Share the pictures and the story that went along with them. It might be revenge porn, but no one would take you seriously ever again, at least not in your field. 

This is what you get for hoping for something more, for letting your guard down, for showing him so much of yourself. It’s what you get for cupping his hand around your heart and expecting him not to curl his finger inward and squeeze until it popped, bloody pulp in the center of his hand. 

You had deposited the most fragile part of yourself, that you’ve kept buried in your chest for years, in the palm of a man that paid you for sex. No matter how kind he had been to you, you were still only a whore. Only good enough, until you weren’t. 

That’s something your mother has always been right about, at least. 

You had let your guard down because you were attracted to him, because he’d said gentle things like I would never let anything happen to you, things like I wish I had met you sooner and I’ll take care of you. He had called you smart and good, and it had felt like sunshine after so many years of rain. 

It had made you want to believe in him so desperately. 

He’d finally seen the tally marks on your skin, the dirt under your nails, heard the grit beneath the coo of your voice, seen you for what you really are. Prying at the loose stone of your age, like running his tongue along over the empty socket of a recently lost tooth, he had not been able to ignore the rest of it any longer.

You’ve replayed that afternoon at the hotel over in your mind a million times, a feedback loop of broken dialogue and wasted dreams, his voice like a scratched CD repeating the same words over and over, cruelly, punishingly. 

The memory has become its own memory, a mirror laughingly reflected back at you. In time, his voice has grown softer in the replays of that afternoon, his words less barbed and more desperate. 

You aren’t sure what to trust, the memory or the clarity that has arrived over the last two weeks. 

You aren’t deluded enough to think sex work hasn’t affected you. A year of grasping, entitled hands, pinching and pulling and prodding, of having to defend yourself and humiliate yourself and do things you’d rather die than do, learning how to coyly push them away, how to spot anger and how to weather it, would affect you for years to come, maybe the rest of your life. 

And, in a sprite of honesty with yourself, you can admit you hadn’t really been present in that hotel room because of it. The comforting remove of disassociation, just the same as when clients would unexpectedly grope you, push your head down so hard your neck ached and you gagged to the point of pain, pushed inside you without any inkling of if you were ready to take them. 

You’d been so terrified he might lash out at you, even though you’re sure Joel wouldn’t, that he’s not that type of man at least. 

You ain’t even gonna say anything? Ain’t even gonna deny it?

How wretched he’d sounded, how desperate and alone. Had he wanted you to deny it? To have a reason to berate you more or because he’d needed you to say it? To tell him it was real? To please, please deny it? 

But you can’t really trust your memory of how he’d sounded, what he’d meant. 

Did it matter, anyway, if his voice had been soft, if he meant something else? It still bruised you, thumb caressing the fuzzed peach flesh of your heart to break the skin with horribly slow pressure, the crust of his nail drawing juice through flesh. He had still said the same words, still held the same accusations. 

Though one question loops around your mind, impossible to answer. Why did it matter if it was real? To him? To you? If you were just sex to him, just companionship and someone to spend time with, why did he care if it was real?

He wanted to pay you; he had wanted to buy you things and give you things and take you places and take care of you. You had both held up your sides of the agreement. So why did it suddenly matter if it wasn’t real?

You know why it matters to you, but why did it matter to Joel so suddenly?

The simplest answer may be the male ego. He fucked you well and so you should love him, feel real things, even if you were nothing to him. 

You wrench yourself away from the spiral of that conundrum. It’s too dangerous and devastating to consider. 

You flick out the bathroom light, dress in your favorite outfit, determined not to feel as shitty as you could, determined to demarcate an end, wrap a bow around it all, in some way. If tears press hard against the back of your eyes, if your lips tremble, no one is there to see it. 

The small cardboard box looms on your kitchen counter, casting a sideways, angular shadow onto the laminate. You catch it up in your hands and stare down at the contents, pitiful in the shaded light of your apartment, blinds drawn closed to keep out the already brutal heat. 

Within lies the credit card, sharp black metal cool to the touch, the tiny wooden sparrow, and the crystal vial of blue bonnet perfume. You’re sure the credit card had been canceled or frozen within minutes of you leaving the hotel, but you still want to return it to him. You aren’t sure if you mean it as a fuck you to his accusation, or just because you don’t know what else to do with it.  Maybe it’s just hard to look at his name, to know something existed nearby etched with those letters. 

The sparrow is wrapped carefully in newspaper. It feels like giving away a part of your heart, but maybe that’s what you need, to pluck out the kernels of Joel left behind in you and give them back, send them off. 

You feel stupid for it, humiliated, to have to navigate the ending of a sugaring arrangement like a bad breakup. It’s only been two weeks but you oscillate between sweeping, near manic, highs and tragic lows, gentle with yourself one moment, that it was okay to grieve, and berating the next for daring to feel broken up about something that meant nothing. 

Your birthday has so far been a grieving day, though only half gentle with yourself. 

You tape the box shut and write the address of the ranch along the top in a shaking script. You can’t bring yourself to write his name, so you leave it off, along with your return address. Even if he wouldn’t come by your place, you don’t want him to look up your address and see how destitute you really are. 

After you walk through the boiling heat and drop it off at the post office, you buy a too expensive cupcake from a bakery down the street and eat it alone on a park bench in the sweltering sun. 

You have Joel to thank, not just for the cushion of money in your bank account to hold you over until the new assistantship starts in the fall, but that you’d think to indulge and treat yourself at all. 

The frosting is sweet but not overly so. 

You want to be angry, even if you aren’t sure if Joel deserves your anger. But all you feel is a crushing numbness, a chilling lonely sadness. 

You hate the pervasive slip of him in your mind, curling around the edges of your consciousness, like a shadow at the corner of your vision, like an infestation you can’t rout out.

The depression rooted in your bones feels no different than it had before you met Joel, but it weighs more heavily because you think you might have almost been happy. 

.

.

.

You stopped watching porn two years ago. 

Though you hadn’t watched it often, after that first night you’d spent at the club in the company of lecherous men, you hadn’t been able to stomach it anymore.

Your body was usually so exhausted anyway, you couldn’t have even if you’d wanted to. Any sex drive you had had been wiped away. 

It was rare you came with the men you slept with, but that didn’t make the mental toll any less taxing. You often felt like you needed to rest, to sleep for days, afterward, downtime you were so rarely afforded. You can admit now that it had depressed you, being used and touched and commanded had taken a toll you hadn’t dared look too closely at. Because you had no other choice, because you needed to continue on. 

Until Joel.

Joel, who made you come almost every time he touched you, who you felt comfortable enough to rest with. There were weekends that you hadn’t had sex, an odd sense of guilt sweeping through your body as you laid next to him, talking and touching but nothing more than that. He’d seemed content with it, too. 

Maybe he hadn’t been, where rose had tinted your vision of Joel before, the edges are now blackened with uncertainty. You aren’t sure you had been reading anything right, too caught up in the blossoming love and affection in your chest, and stupid enough to think maybe he’d return the love of the girl he paid to fuck him. 

A month after you stop seeing Joel, the first inkling of want plants low and weak in your belly as you’re watching television one night. One of those old westerns, in the style you’d watched with Joel. You’re loath to admit the actor looks like him again, that his hands and arms are veiny and muscled and remind you of Joel and that’s what does it.

You seize the moment and for the first time in two years, open a browser and search for something, anything, that doesn’t remind you of him. For one horrible moment, you think of driving out to the club, offering your body and want to someone who wanted it, at least for a while. 

It makes you feel ill to watch, a fairly vanilla, badly produced cut of a girl sucking dick, but the discomfort of looking at porn at least distracts you from him. The man looks nothing like Joel, even if his face is rarely shown, and she looks nothing like you. 

You come after a few minutes of furiously rubbing your clit, trying to get it over as quickly as you can. But when you come, it doesn’t feel good and all you can think about is the first time you’d had phone sex with Joel, how good it felt, sitting on the couch as you are now. 

If you cry afterward, no one is there to see it. 

.

.

.

You yank your curtains closed one Saturday at the beginning of May, determined to languish in bed all day, wallow in the sadness with nowhere to go lodged firmly in your heart. Pain like little zaps of lightning constricting your chest every so often. 

You’d spent the previous day on a high, untouchable and fearless and not sad about anything especially Joel. You hadn’t thought about him all day while on campus, engaging instead with your cohort for maybe the first time ever. You’d liked listening to them talk about things you were passionate about, liked listening to them joke even if you were outside the joke, having been too busy and desperate to hang out with them much before. 

Maybe you’d had a few drinks, and maybe you’re feeling it now, in the pounding behind your eyes. At least you’d felt good for a whole day. It was progress. 

It’s so hot you can feel the heat through the glass as you drag the fabric into place. The parking lot beyond is a desolate yellowish orange, cracked, broken pavement, scrubby grass that chokes the concrete, the rock strewn planter boxes that have never had a plant in them as long as you’ve been there. 

Your apartment is warm, despite the AC being on low. The unit belches warm air across the room in a murky wave, something sweetly rotten about it. The heat makes your hangover worse, but it's at least a different kind of pain than you’d grown used to.  

There’s no point in calling your landlord to repair it. If he deigned to send someone to fix it at all, it would take weeks for them to actually get around to you. And you only have a few weeks left in this apartment anyway. Cardboard boxes litter the floor between your bed and the wall, the vast ocean of the living room floor. With the new salary, you’ll be able to afford somewhere better. In a better part of town, in a better building, with enough wiggle room to save something every month. 

It’s a miracle you never thought possible. You should feel proud, but you feel nothing. 

You slip beneath the still sunwarmed sheets and stare into the dim gray light of your bedroom, listening to the strain of the air conditioner, the distant notes of birdsong hung on the air, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. You allow yourself to drift, to curl back into the comforting arms of sleep. 

But when you allow your mind to drift, when you sleep, there’s only one place your mind deigns to wander. 

And though you feel ill at ease for thinking of him, for craving the reunion and attention in your mind, you don’t stop yourself either. You’ve been mostly good about not moping, not mourning, trying not to feel like you lost something. 

He was never yours to begin with, not really. A touchstone in the dark, a light to brighten your path only briefly, and that was it. 

Maybe crawling back into bed is indulging a side of yourself that you shouldn’t, but you can’t help it, you miss him and you’ve been strong the last few weeks, you’ve been so good, about not letting yourself linger with him in your mind, of pushing away the thoughts and not indulging in the melancholy. And you didn’t think about him at all yesterday so it’s okay to think of him now. 

Joel sweeps through your mind in fragments, illusions of multicolored glass and long told stories of what could have been. If you hadn’t lied or had come clean sooner, if you really were older, if you weren’t playing at being his fucking whore, maybe things would have been different, maybe your paths would have never crossed. 

The way he smiled when he saw you, how he always walked with one hand on your spine, held your hand in public, took you dancing even when he said he didn’t dance, how he always wanted to make you come, even when you told him it was okay, he didn’t have to.

You aren’t sure how to nurse a broken heart. You’ve never had one before, never had the opportunity to have one, and you’re not sure you should indulge in it but you think you’re doing all right. You’re doing good, though you wish you had someone to stroke your cheek and tell you so. 

It’s something you have no right to, though, not when Joel had made it so clear he thought nothing of you, not really. 

But you’d meant what you said to him that night at the drive-in, you’d really believed he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you, you thought you’d understood what he meant when he said he wished he’d met you sooner. To preserve you from the hurt inflicted by other men, but you have to reconsider everything that he’d ever said to you. 

Maybe he had lied, though what the point would be you couldn’t imagine. You would fuck him no matter what, he was paying you for that. Maybe he was just sorry that you’d already been so used. 

Despite it all, you miss him. 

You miss the warmth of his body next to yours in the cool dark of the hotel room, the pressure of his fingers around yours, thumb stroking circles into the back of your hand, the interior of your wrist; you miss the soft reassurance of his voice his voice carried even when he was talking about something like fixing a fence post, because you’d asked him to talk about his day, about himself, no matter how boring. 

You miss his hand between your legs, stroking your thighs, the soft folds of your cunt. You miss his lips against your forehead, the murmuring of a thousand praises. You miss his hand curled around your throat, miss the way he knew you liked it, that he’d deliberately found out how to do it without risk of hurting you after refusing the first time you encouraged him to close his fingers around your neck. 

Worse was the way he so carefully pulled you apart, ribboning pleasure out of you, wrapping it around his fingers until there was nothing left to tug forth, when you tried anal. So careful in it, so worried about hurting you, not knowing it wouldn’t be the worst thing to ever happen to you. 

It’s a little point of pride, maybe, that you’d taken a fifty-something man’s anal virginity, that he’s only ever been inside you that way. You’d never done it again but it had felt so good, and it was because of him. Had he been any less careful, it might have been painful or horrible the way so many of your other firsts had been with other men. 

He’s the only one you’ve ever liked having inside you in any way, the weight and heat and stretch of him perfect, and because he’d know the importance of touching you, using his hands in other places. 

Sleep is suddenly elusive, an ache springing up between your legs. This time, unlike the last, you let the want of him linger. 

The fantasy careens into a vision of him between your thighs, prising you apart, tongue on your pussy, humming like he’d never tasted anything quite so sweet. You can feel the press of his broad shoulders against the backs of your thighs, the heat of his skin against yours, so hot it burns. 

Sweat gathers at the backs of your knees and beneath your breasts. You shift one hand between your legs, trying not to feel as though you’re betraying yourself, the other to squeeze your tits, one and then the other, trying to replicate an impossible pressure because your hands aren’t calloused, your fingers aren’t wide enough to stretch you open right.

They aren’t thick enough, either, when you press them inside you, but it’ll have to do. 

The sweet of it disappears, the memory of his fingers in your mouth, making you gag, the punishing distance of your last time together. It’s like an intrusive thought that you can’t reject fast enough. 

It all falls apart in a matter of moments, like you can’t breathe around the fingers in your throat, but you ache to hear him praise you for taking it anyway. You let him squeeze you too tight and manhandle you because you trust him, and that’s what makes you open your eyes, stare at the crack in your bedroom ceiling with unidentifiable, turbulent, unravelable feelings caving in your chest. 

You feel rattled, fingers splayed against your cunt but not moving. Despite the need throbbing in your stomach, you pull your hand away and breathe out harshly, letting your mind settle so you can think. 

It’s only after a long moment or two that you realize your mattress is humming with the buzzing echo of vibrations from your phone where you’d tossed it earlier. 

When you flip it over to see the caller ID, your body freezes, hands skeletal and mortified, rimmed around the edges of the screen.

joel, it reads, a smooth black background behind the white lettering because you don’t have any pictures of him.  

You stare and stare and in a fugue state, a dreamlike haze, answer the call and lift the phone to your ear. 

It’s silent for a long moment. 

Then you hear him take in breath. “Cherry?” he asks, voice shaky and desperate and far away. “Are you there, darlin’?” 

You don’t answer, listening to him breathe, listening to the line buzzing, before you wrench the phone away from your face and end the call, flinging it away from you, lungs tight.

You bury your face in your pillow, inhaling the still lingering scent of the blue bell perfume, wishing you had anything that still held his scent, wishing that you hadn’t picked up the phone, wishing that you’d said something, wishing that you had a recording of his voice because it still soothed you even if it hurt too. 

It might be for the best that you hung up, but it still stings, another hurt to add to the sparkling collection on the littered shore of your heart.

.

.

.

“Hey.” 

You glance up from your computer monitor to find a guy from your program standing beside your desk. Social awareness washes over you all at once, makes you straighten your spine and tilt your mouth into a smile. 

When you glance around, you find most of the office empty, evening sunshine lashing across the gray tile and grayer cubicles further into the room. The sea of grayness is at least cut by the wooden island of the graduate assistants’ desks clumped together in the middle of the room. You aren’t quite important enough yet to have your own flimsy little walls yet. 

Without waiting for an invitation, he sits down at the desk across from you, leaning to the side so you can see each other around the computer screens. Your rich but kind deskmate is already gone, just a cloud of too expensive perfume and leather left in her wake.

“Hi,” you answer, hitching your smile more firmly into place when you meet his eyes again, folding your arms across the tabletop in front of your keyboard. “What’s up?” 

He blows out a breath, cheeks puffing out. “Glad I caught you.” 

His name is. . .his name eludes you. You should definitely know it, the program is small enough and he was definitely there when you got drinks with your other colleagues a couple weeks before. He’s handsome in a boyish way, messy brown hair and a dimple in his cheek. Brown eyes that crinkle when he smiles.  

He’s around your age, maybe a year or two older. 

You blink at his assertion. “You are?”

“Yeah! You’re always gone before I can catch you.”

“Catch me?” You ask, raising a brow.

“To ask you out,” he says as though it’s obvious and maybe it is but not to you. “But you’re always gone by four.” 

“Could have asked me some other time,” you answer teasingly, a lick of nerves scraping up your spine, leaning back to needlessly straighten things on your desk, the cup of pens, the stack of folders to your left. 

He waves a genial hand at you. “Ah, too intimidated, y’know?” 

“Well I guess that makes you rather bold at the moment.” 

“We graduate in a week,” he grins, “might as well shoot my shot. And unlike you, some of us didn’t get a PhD spot and have to go to our second choice half way across the country, so if you reject me spectacularly, at least I won’t have to see you and yearn for what could have been from behind the water cooler.”

You laugh. He’s charming in an odd kind of way. “Sorry. I know I haven’t made an inroad with most of you. I. . .work a lot, at a second job.” 

Work? Is that what you want to call it? All you did was lie on your fucking back and spread your legs. The spike of guilt, the nasty thought, darts through your mind so quickly, like a lancing pulse of pain, before it spirals away. It’s so common a self-deprecation it barely even registers anymore. 

“Yeah, so I heard, which is fucking crazy. I was so busy with one I could barely see straight. You definitely should have been the one they were wooing with money and grants and waivers and shit at the beginning.” 

You bite your lip. 

His eyes are brown and familiar, and its nice to hear nice things about yourself, even if he’s just trying to fuck you before he flits into another life. Maybe you don’t care if he is, the attention is nice.  

“Well, I don’t know about that—”

“But they saw the error of their ways,” he lifts a finger into the air to interrupt you, “which is fucking rare in academia.” He leans back in his chair, head tipping back, eyes roving over the ceiling. “And, well, Astrid told me she thought you had a boyfriend.” 

Astrid, your trustfund baby deskmate who had once overhead a phone call with Joel. “Oh.” 

His face flashes through your mind, a tight spiral of shame and hurt tucking into the space between your ribs, teeth gnawing on ivory branches. 

Boyfriend isn’t the right word, but what can you say? My sugardaddy dumped me after fucking me one last time and I was stupid enough to fall in love with him along the way? 

Boyfriend would have to suffice. 

“Not anymore,” you murmur. 

“Ah, sorry about that.” 

“No, it’s. . .maybe it’s for the best.” 

It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like there’s a rock in your stomach, a linchpin of grief and love with nowhere to go slowly slipping out of its socket. 

“I mean, look,” he says, “fuck him. You’re pretty and smart and successful. So fuck him.” 

“You just want me to go out with you.” 

“Well, yeah.” 

It’s endearing and so forward and clear. And you aren’t beholden to anyone anymore, and its been a very long time since you went out with a man because you liked him, and not because he was paying you to suck his dick. 

“Okay, I’m almost finished here.” 

“Great,” he settles back in the chair. “I’ll wait.” 

.

.

.

His name is Matt. 

It’s only with a little clever conversational maneuvering at the dingy college bar that you manage to get him to say it without directly having to ask him what it is. The room smells like stale beer, dark wood obscuring how dirty the floors and tables are. 

You feel bad that you hadn’t known it before. 

He’s sweet in a frat boy kind of way, though smarter than any you’d met during undergrad. 

If you weren’t so heartsore, if you’d never met Joel, you think you might actually have felt something for him, been attracted to him, for his boisterousness, for the ease with which he laughs and buys rounds of drinks and speaks with strangers. 

But your body and soul are tired. You feel much older than you are, weighted with sins that are only half yours, with memories of other men that jump occasionally to the front of your mind without warning.

As soon as you have health insurance, you will be finding a therapist. Someone who can help you sort through the shame and guilt and fear and get your head straight, though you worry you might be affected forever. You’re removed far enough from it now that you can see the trauma latticed over your bones, colonizing your veins. PTSD, someone would probably say, though not you. It’s not like you went to war, you’re just fucking broken.   

It’s been a long time since you went out with anyone you weren’t trying to solicit, that wasn’t paying you to sit next to them and fuck them, and you find yourself almost slipping back into the familiar grooves of it. You’ve contorted yourself into something else for so long that being yourself feels like wearing someone else’s clothes that fit too tightly, that itch at your skin. 

Matt buys your drinks and makes you a little circle of quick friends playing pool and darts, graduate students from other programs and a little squadron of undergrads that aren’t handling their alcohol very well. 

He wraps his arm around your waist, hand resting on the strip of skin between your jeans and shirt comfortably. Jeans you’d left tucked in your car unless you ever needed a quick change with Joel. You try not to feel weird about it, about the jeans, or like you’re doing something wrong or betraying someone who didn’t give a fuck about you.

Still, you hear his voice, tinny over twenty second phone call.  

Joel pockets in and out of your mind each time Matt touches you, sliding in front of you when you least expect it, the hurt like a wound you keep sticking your finger into. 

The discomfort, the playacting of a prostitute you’re trying to fend off, only loosens and slips away when you’re on your third drink.

Matt buys you a fourth while one of the undergrads tells you about a house party they’re heading to at one of the frats. 

“Wanna go?” He says in your ear, his breath holding the warm scent of beer, hand squeezing your hip and then your ass. 

“Aren’t we a little old for frat parties?” 

“Nah, c’mon, how old are you, twenty-four, five? We’re too young to be thinking we’re too old.” 

You like his enthusiasm, the bright way he smiles at you, even if it doesn’t quite sit right inside you. And, besides, you never really had the chance to go out much when you were an undergrad, so why not now. You feel the beginnings of an upswing in mood, a violent one eighty of positivity that will leave you hollow and dizzy later.  

“Okay,” you agree, and follow the gaggle of twenty year olds out the bar and down the street, passing darkened university buildings, halos of streetlight wreathed in late spring humidity, watched on by a fat yellow moon, heavy in the corner of the sky. 

It reminds you of lying beneath the stars with Joel, whispering truths in his ear, sneaking parts of your past, of yourself, between the bars of his ribs, prisoners passing a key between cells. Or so you had thought, maybe that key opened something else entirely.  

There’s too much light to see the stars, but knowing they’re overhead is enough to make melancholy settle briefly on your heart. 

You stumble along, the world careening and smashing around you in a way it only can when you’re drinking, swaying, like a giant has clutched the marionette strings of the earth in eager fingers, swinging it a little too enthusiastically. 

Light pulses from a house at the end of a well lit street you turn onto, passing one party after another. 

“Is it a holiday?” You ask Matt. 

He just laughs and drags you up the concrete front steps, wrought iron railing cold beneath your fingers. You stumble and he doesn’t notice, already at the dark, broad wooden front door, creaking open, fingers of pulsing light sweeping out to where you went to one knee on the steps. 

“Oh, shit,” he says, only belatedly moving toward you, “No, it’s just a Friday, y’know?”

Joel would have never let go of your hand.  

Inside, music thrums hard and loud, drowning out the sound of laughter and shouting. Bodies pack in so tightly, you have to squeeze between them with some amount of force, following Matt to a kitchen filled to the brim with red cups and open bottles of booze, the floors so sticky it’s hard to lift your feet. 

“What do you want first?” Matt asks. 

You hesitate and then decide to just let go. 

Fuck Joel and all the memories he planted like landmines within you. 

Fuck Joel and all the lies he thought you told. 

.

.

.

The room spins, vibrant technicolor swirls of light and laughter.  

Someone hands you another drink, and you swallow it without looking. A girl drops a pill in your hand and you take that too, because you never did this when you were supposed to. Party and have fun, and this is fun. It’s fun. 

Matt is still at your side, laughing, hand inside your back pocket, squeezing your ass warmly. 

You pull him aside and kiss him in a darkened hallway, the music so loud you can’t hear yourself think, the vibrations of it rumbling against your back pressed against the wall. 

It’s okay when he presses his hand beneath your shirt, shouts in your ear about a bedroom upstairs. 

You’ve fucked in worse places, but you don’t want those wires to get crossed. You aren’t working right now, you don’t do that anymore, you’re supposed to enjoy this. You aren’t a whore, you’re just a girl on a night out. 

And for a while, you do enjoy it. 

You let him touch you and take you upstairs and lock some random person’s door behind you. 

And even though his hair is brown but not graying, it’s fine. And even though his eyes are the wrong shade of brown, it’s fine. His hands aren’t as broad, his fingers thinner, his face smooth, the hair on his chest not as thick and wiry and you—

It’s fine, it’s fine, it's so fine. 

It’s fine when he takes your hand and puts it on his half hard cock and tells you to make him feel good.

You haven’t had sex outside of sex work in years, and you’re having trouble remembering how to, if you aren’t desperately trying please and predict and be the perfect prostitute, then what are you suppose to do? You worry you’re just lying there, but your thoughts are moving so slowly and lethargically, at a remove from the way he’s yanking your shirt up and over your head, clumsily fumbling with the clasp of your bra.

You absentmindedly rub him through his jeans even though you suddenly don’t want to. 

The room convulses. 

You feel hot and panicked suddenly and you aren’t sure if it’s what you took earlier or if you’re in the beginnings of a panic attack. You feel frozen with the sudden fear that he’ll want you to touch him directly. Of course he’ll want you to touch him. 

In your cherry, candy coated dreams of the future, you had imagined what the first time with Joel would be like, without lies and secrets, without being paid for the privilege. A romantic, silly notion, that things would be drastically different just because the sword of exchange wouldn’t be hanging above you. 

The realization that the man touching you, kissing you sloppily and not realizing you stopped  moving your lips minutes before, is going to want to put his dick inside you makes you sick. You don’t want to fuck him, and you don’t want to jerk him off or blow him just so he won’t fuck you. 

When he drags your jeans and underwear down, you jerk away with a gasp. 

“Wait, stop.” 

And he does and you feel lucky and then awful at the relief. You sit there trying to catch your breath, time passing in long starts and stops. 

“I can’t, I don’t—” 

“Hey.” A hand on your spine, guiding your head down between your knees. “Relax. We don’t have to.” He sounds concerned, and just a little annoyed, but the concern outweighs the annoyance. 

Humiliated, to once again be sitting in some unfamiliar room, with a mostly unfamiliar man, with your panties caught around your knees, thin and feeble. The feeling sours and writhes, chasing up your throat, curling at the back of your throat. Are you just. . .meant to end up here? On your back, welcoming to whoever wanted you for the next five minutes? 

He hands you your shirt and you lift your head long enough to tug it on. His hand lands on your spine again, what you assume is supposed to be comforting makes your skin crawl. You never want anyone to touch you again, you can’t be trusted with it. 

“You’re sweating a lot,” he says suddenly. “What did you take?” 

“I’m gonna be sick,” you mumble, lurching up from the bed, yanking up your underwear and jeans, wrenching futilely at the bedroom lock until the door opens with a creak. 

Someone is just coming out of the bathroom across the hall, you jerk the door closed behind you, falling to your knees in front of the toilet, disgust merging seamlessly with shame, a pinwheel of emotions that tip and spike down your spine. Something watery comes up and you feel a little better. 

You slump to the floor, back against the side of the bathtub, hands shaking, sweat slicking your neck and chest, dampening your forehead and the space behind your knees, trying to breathe through the panic or the disappointment or maybe it’s just a bad trip. Combined with the alcohol, it makes it hard to think.

Someone is knocking on the bathroom door but you ignore it in favor of pulling out your phone. There’s only one person you want to call, who despite it all, you think would probably come get you, find you, help you. You don’t want anyone else to touch you and he’d make sure of that. 

Trembling fingers search for Joel’s contact, stab at it until his name appears and ringing echoes. 

It rings, and rings, and rings, so you know he hasn’t blocked you after you rejected his call. 

A feeble wash of hope, hope of what, you aren’t sure. 

But it clicks to voicemail and when you call again, the same cycle repeats. 

You try three more times before giving up. 

Someone is still knocking at the door. 

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

The Codebreaker

pairing: Platonic!Task Force 141 x Reader

synopsys: You had always kept your distance from the team—focused, distant, and hidden behind a mask. But when a mission goes wrong and you get gravely injured, the team is forced to confront what they’ve never seen: the person behind the mask.

warnings: Angst, injury, near-death experience, trust issues, emotional tension, some swearing, Ghost being protective, emotional revelations, Ghost and Reader’s situationship…

word count: 1798

No one in the 141 knew much about Phantom.

You were a ghost among ghosts, a shadow wrapped in tactical gear. A tech expert, the best they’d ever seen—able to slice through encrypted networks like butter, reroute enemy drones mid-air, and turn any battlefield into a controlled digital playground. If the mission required intel, misdirection, or cyber sabotage, Phantom had it covered before anyone even finished asking.

But off the field?

You blended into the background, as if you were part of the walls. Not unfriendly, just… distant. Spoke only when necessary, never rude but always concise. Answered when asked, nodded when acknowledged, but never lingered in conversations longer than needed.

You weren’t cold, just hard to grasp.

A constant presence but never the center of attention.

The others noticed, of course.

Soap had once muttered to Gaz, "He doesn't take up space."

And he was right.

You never interrupted, never inserted yourself into banter or stories. When you were in the room, you were invisible in a way that had nothing to do with their tactical skills. You occupied the corner of the rec room with a laptop, earbuds in, or sat with a sudoku book in your hands, solving puzzles in complete silence. Always listening but never there in the way the others were.

Even in base, You never exposed their face or body. Gear came off only in private, always ensuring no one caught so much as a glimpse of skin. High-collared undershirts, gloves, layers—never a stray detail out of place.

The team accepted it without question.

Phantom, how you were called, was an expert at keeping unknown.

And everyone just assumed you were a man.

Soap had tried, on multiple occasions, to break through that quiet shell, determined to make some kind of dent.

"Do you ever relax, Phantom?"

"I’m relaxed now."

"Christ, mate, that’s sad."

Phantom hadn’t reacted, just kept solving their sudoku puzzle.

Gaz had once thrown a pack of gum at you during a mission debrief, just to see if you’d catch it without looking. You had, effortlessly, then tossed it back without a word.

Price trusted you without hesitation. He never questioned the silence, never pushed for more than they were willing to give. If Phantom said something was secure, it was secure. If Phantom gave a time frame, Phantom met it.

And Ghost?

Ghost understood you in a way the others didn’t. He never pried, never asked. He knew what it was like to live behind a mask, to carry a name that wasn’t really a name.

Phantom wasn’t close to the team—not in the way they were with each other. But they were part of it. A constant presence, woven into the unit’s rhythm.

And that was enough.

Until the mission where everything fell apart.

"We’re in and out. Quick, clean, no unnecessary noise" Price said, voice steady as he laid out the plan.

A cartel base deep in hostile territory. High-value intel buried in their systems, locked behind multiple layers of encryption. The team needed Phantom to get in, extract the files, and be out before anyone knew they were there.

Easy.

For them, at least.

"I’ll crack their network before we breach," You said, tapping at your wrist console. "Should have access to their security feed before we even hit the ground."

Price nodded. "Ghost, Soap—you’ll be Phantom’s cover. Gaz and I will clear the outer perimeter. We move fast. Any questions?"

No one spoke.

"Good. Wheels up in ten."

Phantom did a final check of their gear, making sure their mask was secure, their gloves snug against their fingers. The mission was simple.

They’d done riskier ops before.

So why did something feel… off?

The op started smoothly.

You breached the cartel’s network before your boots even hit the ground, feeding the enemy false security reports and rerouting camera feeds. The team moved through the compound like shadows, taking down targets with ruthless efficiency.

They reached the objective with zero complications.

Too easy.

You worked fast, fingers flying across their portable console as they pulled the files. They barely glanced up when Ghost muttered, "Make it quick."

A few more keystrokes—then a small confirmation beep.

"Got it."

Price’s voice came through comms. "Extraction point secure. Move."

And that’s when everything went to hell.

The moment they stepped outside, the alarms blared.

"Shite," Soap cursed.

Your blood went cold. "That’s not me. I disabled their systems—"

Gunfire erupted before they could finish the sentence.

The cartel had known they were coming.

A goddamn trap.

"Move!" Price barked, his voice sharp through comms.

The team pushed forward, cutting through enemies as they raced toward the extraction point. You stayed low, recalibrating your wrist console to jam the cartel’s reinforcements.

Everyone was so focused on the fight that they didn’t see the sniper.

Not until it was too late.

A sharp, searing pain tore through your chest.

You staggered, breath catching, as your body folded under the impact. Their gloved hand pressed to their vest, but it was already warm, slick. Blood. Too much of it.

Distantly, you heard Soap’s frantic voice through comms.

"Sniper! Tech's hit—shit, they’re down!"

Boots pounded against the ground—Ghost, closing in fast.

"Stay with me, mate," he ordered, voice tight as he dropped beside them. "Keep your eyes open."

You tried, really tried, but breathing wasn’t working right.

Every inhale rattled, wet and sharp, drowning them from the inside. Panic clawed at their ribs.

Ghost’s hands were on their mask.

"Gotta get this off," he muttered.

A sharp pocket knife was pulled from his belt—a sleek line drawn across your mask—then cool air hit your face.

Ghost froze.

His expression shifted—something unreadable flickering behind his eyes.

And then you blacked out.

When you woke up, you felt like drowning.

Pain swallowed you whole.

It was the first thing you felt, the first thing that told you—you were alive. It burned, sharp and relentless, twisting inside your ribs like a serrated knife. Every breath rattled, wet and broken, lungs struggling to work through the thick haze of agony.

Something beeped steadily nearby. The scent of antiseptic clung to the air, cold and sterile. The weight of blankets pressed down on you, too heavy, too confining.

Hospital.

Your fingers twitched weakly, brushing against the IV in your arm. The world blurred and steadied, the dull light above flickering as you forced your gaze to shift.

You turn your head sluggishly, and that’s when you saw them—you weren't alone.

Price, Ghost, Gaz, and Soap.

They stood around your bed, too still, too silent.

Their usual confidence, their sharp-edged ease—gone. In its place was something heavier. Something unfamiliar.

"How bad?" you rasped.

Soap let out a breath—sharp, unsteady. "You almost died, lass."

Lass.

The word lodged deep, piercing more than the bullet had.

Right, they knew now.

Something cold curled in your stomach.

Price’s voice broke through the heavy quiet. "Shot went through your lung. We barely got you out."

You swallowed, gaze fixed on the IV in your arm. "It doesn’t change anything."

A scoff. Bitter. Tired. Ghost.

"Yeah, it does."

The words weren’t sharp. They weren’t a reprimand, or an accusation.

They were quiet. Weighted.

Gaz ran a hand down his face, exhaling hard. "Bloody hell, Phantom. We didn’t know what to think."

They were still processing it. Still recalibrating everything they thought they knew. Phantom could see it in their faces—the way their eyes traced over her now, like they were seeing her for the first time. Like they were realizing how much they didn’t know.

"Should’ve told us," Price murmured, not unkindly.

Not a command. Not even a question. Just… something else. Something you didn’t know how to name.

You wet your cracked lips. "Would it have made a difference?"

Ghost’s jaw tightened, gaze darkening. "You wouldn’t have been bleeding out on the ground with a mask suffocating you."

Silence.

Cold. Heavy.

Soap let out a breath, rubbing a hand over his face. He looked… lost. Frustrated. "Do you even trust us?"

The question settled like a weight on your chest.

Did you?

You had spent years making sure no one got close enough to ask. It had always been easier that way—no questions, no attachments, no complications.

You opened your mouth.

Then closed it.

Price’s voice was quieter now, steady. "Look, we’re not mad. We just—" He exhaled, shaking his head. "We care, kid. That’s all."

Gaz nodded. "You’re family, Phantom."

Family.

The word dug into your ribs like shrapnel.

Your fingers curled into the stiff fabric of the blanket, lungs too tight, throat raw.

Soap sighed, rubbing his temples. "Christ, lass. We thought we lost you." His voice cracked. Barely noticeable. But it still struck like a bullet between your ribs.

Ghost was silent. Arms crossed, shoulders tense. His usual unreadable mask firmly in place—except for the way his fingers twitched against his sleeve.

Like he was holding something back.

Like he was holding himself together.

You weren’t used to this.

Weren’t used to people giving a damn about whether you came back or not.

"I’m here," you muttered, unsure if it was meant to reassure them or yourself.

Ghost’s eyes stayed on you, unreadable but piercing.

"Yeah," Ghost murmured. "Barely."

You wanted to joke, to brush it off, but there was no dodging this.

Not when you had seen the way they’d looked at you the moment you woke up.

Not when the usual mate had been replaced by lass and she.

Soap let out a dry laugh, shaking his head. "Y’know, I should’ve guessed. You were always too fuckin’ quiet. The real mystery is how we didn’t clock it sooner."

You raised a brow. "Because I made sure you didn’t."

Soap huffed. "Aye, well, I’m starting to think we should’ve pried a little harder."

"You would’ve gotten nowhere," you muttered.

"Yeah, I’m getting that."

There was a long pause, thick with something unspoken.

Then, Ghost shifted closer, standing at the side of the bed. "You’re one of us, Phantom." The words were calm, certain. "Doesn’t matter what’s under the mask. Never did."

Your throat tightened.

Price sighed, stepping forward and placing a careful hand on your shoulder—solid, grounding. "We’ve got your six, Phantom. Always."

Gaz nudged your foot lightly, the closest thing to a brotherly shove he could manage with you stuck in a hospital bed. "Next time, don’t scare the shit out of us, yeah?"

You exhaled a soft, tired laugh. "No promises."

Soap groaned. "Jesus. We’re doomed."

Laughter rippled through the room, something lighter breaking through the tension.

You let your eyes drift over them—these men who had been her teammates, her squadmates, but were now something else entirely.

Family.

It still felt foreign. 

strange even.

But maybe, just maybe…

You could learn to live with it.

taglist: @honestlymassivetrash @pythonmoth

[dreamtofus]

only in quotes

pairing: joel miller x f!sex worker!reader

wc: 7.6k

summary: Things can't keep going on as they have, can they?

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), smut [piv, choking, fingers in mouth, gagging, sex position that would probably hurt, sex that feels impersonal (idk what else to call this, if there's a word let me know)], dissociation, ptsd, angst, anxiety and spiraling thoughts, unhealthy coping methods, reader is a sex worker, internalized shame, self deprecation, guilt, emotional vulnerability, mentions of poverty, language regarding past unsafe sex, joel being an asshole bc he's scared

a/n: this was originally two parts but I didn't vibe with it as two. points to you if you can guess where it was originally supposed to be separated. as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading! please don't hate me! i am very sorry.

“We want to offer you a place in the doctoral program.” 

The fluorescent light above you buzzes, a ringing echoes in your ears. You aren’t sure you heard the woman across from you correctly, a solid oak desk between you. “I’m sorry, I think. . .I think I misheard.”

She smiles, “You’ve been admitted to the doctoral program.” 

“But there’s only two spots.” 

The corner of her mouth twitches. “Yes, and one is yours, if you want it.” She keeps talking but the words wash over you foamy and white, lost in the sea of thoughts tumbling through your mind. 

She’s uttering magic words. 

Words like passed, and top of the cohort, and research assistantship, and great application and tuition credit waivers. 

“We regret not seeing more potential in you,” she finishes, and your throat closes. It almost feels as good as being called smart. It’s vindicating even if you understand why they hadn’t before. The sharp drop in your grades the final year of undergrad had done it, impacted your gpa because you were working and not sleeping. 

Maybe you have always been good enough, just without the right tools. 

“Are you okay?” Her smile is still in place, like she’s well versed in the breakdown of graduate students in her office. 

A brief, intense, flash of gratitude, for her kindness, for Joel’s suggestion so long ago that you get a different advisor, subtle encouragement thereafter to follow through with it. An idea he never knew you pursued. Maybe he guessed, when you stopped randomly crying about grant proposals. 

“Just overwhelmed,” you manage. “Thank you.”

You leave her office in a daze, wandering through the building like a zombie, feeling slowly returning to your hands and feet when you exit into the courtyard. 

Relief crashes into you all at once, blooms in your chest like a flower finally cracking through pavement, and your knees nearly buckle. 

You have plop down on one of the stone benches, waves of warm spring sunshine cascading around you. The stone beneath your legs is cool, even through your slacks. It grounds you, brings the world slowly back into focus.

Your hands are still shaking when you press them to your mouth. 

The relief is so intense that you begin to feel dizzy and lightheaded, that a nauseous feeling writhes in your belly, snakes through your ribs in tight stitches, until you have to bend at the waist and push your head between your knees to stave off the feeling. 

“Oh god,” you mumble to yourself, lucky that the courtyard is empty and no one is around to witness the miniature breakdown that wants to consume you. 

The worry that you’d cordoned off in your heart for so long floods out of you all at once, stored there for years, ignored and repressed and congealed between the ventricles and tendon, slowly choking you, killing you.

Pride pools on your belly, that you saw it through, and saw it through well, that you are good at what you do. The salary that comes with the assistantship is a pittance but not pennies. It will be enough, and you aren’t sure that’s ever been true for you before. 

Your mother, your father, your circumstances have been wrong all along. 

It’s over, you realize. It’s done. Selling yourself, scratching and clawing and scrabbling for something more.  

Can it really be over?

How easy it would have been, to give up and go home to your mother, or give in and let prostitution take over your life. The last two years flash through your mind in a technicolor whirl. 

All the terrible things that you’ve done and had done to you. 

All the early morning Mondays you spent at the free clinic being tested for STIs, waiting for something terrible to come up on the test results even though you tried to be careful, all the times you made yourself physically ill because your period was late and you thought you were pregnant. 

All the men that had touched you, hurt you, laughingly, lecherously carved out pieces of you, your soul, to keep for themselves. 

You laugh and lift your head, cupping your chin in your hands instead, elbows braced on your knees. 

It could have been worse, you think distantly, faintly, in the way that you only can with the knowledge that something is behind you. 

If Joel hadn’t come along and selfishly kept you to himself, it could have been worse. You would have spent the last year with more unfamiliar bodies, ruining yourself. Maybe it would have broken you, maybe you wouldn’t have made it this far, if you’d had to continue on as you had been. 

The memory of Joel watching you from across the club the night he asked you to be his sugarbaby slips to the front of your mind. The taut pull of his shoulders, the protective, looming dark shadow of him next to you when the man you’d been attempting to solicit had slapped your ass, protective. A moment that you can admit now, changed everything.

You want to tell someone the news. 

Joel is the only person you want to call. The only person worth telling. The only person who will truly understand the depth of what it means.  

You sit up and fish around in your bag, searching for your phone, but as soon as your fingers touch the cool metal, you pause. 

It would be better to tell him in person, this weekend. 

There’s a lift of hope in your heart, that maybe now things can be different. In your life generally, but with Joel, too. 

You don’t need to rely on his support, his money and goodwill, and maybe that evens things out between you.

Things can be. . .normal.

There’s the question of the lie, too, and how he’ll react to it. Maybe it won’t matter, maybe it will, maybe it’ll take him some time to get over or come to terms with it, but no matter what, you won’t have to go back to the club, you won’t have to prostrate yourself before strange men to survive. 

And, the question of his feelings. Maybe paying for you is the only thing that’s allowed him to ignore how much younger you are than him, regardless of a lie or not. If he no longer has to pay, to take care of you, would he still want you around? Would it ruin the fantasy?

For so many months you’ve reminded him and yourself that that’s all you are. A whore, someone he got his dick wet with, someone he used and paid for, even if he was kind to you. Now you don’t have to be, and what will it mean when you aren’t? 

If you aren’t his sugarbaby, what are you? Do you dare to want him to want more?                                           

Your mood dips, but only a little, it’s hard to feel weighed down by anything at the moment. You feel free, weightless, like lead has been lifted from your chest, like your wings are unbound and unfurled for the first time in years. 

Maybe he doesn’t feel anything for you beyond the narrow straits of the relationship you already have. But it won’t end your life, won’t send you back to a seedy club and sticky floors, bruised knees and an aching scalp. 

The knowledge makes you braver. It would be okay, even if it hurt, even if you want him to feel something for you so badly it’s an aching, pulsing wound overflowing with salt. It’s time to tell him, everything, all of it—your accomplishment and that you want him at your graduation and your real age and that you very stupidly fell in love with him somewhere along the way. 

You want to tell him your real name, whisper it in his ear, listen to him speak it back to you.

You feel as though you’ve been living on borrowed time anyway, not sure why Maria and Tommy never said anything to Joel. It’s been weeks, months, since that day at the drive-in. Maybe you’d misjudged the whole thing, maybe Joel had been able to explain, maybe he hadn’t felt whatever they said was worth repeating to you. 

For a while, you’d convinced yourself that you would quit him, as you’d intended, but the words never fell from your lips. One look at him, and you told yourself just one more weekend with him, that was all. And here you are, months later, still seeing him. 

You still want to talk to him, just to hear his voice, even if you aren’t divulging anything yet. He’s still the only person you want to call. 

You stand and walk through the morning sunshine in the direction of the parking garage, fingers of tantalizing hope zipping up your spine, looping around your mind, fantasies of what a normal life will feel like buzzing through your mind. 

Joel picks up on the second ring, a grunt of a greeting in his voice. “You okay?”

“Yeah, why?” 

“Don’t usually call this time of day.” 

“Oh, if this is a bad time—”

He grunts again, “Didn’t say that.” 

“What are you doing that has you moaning like that? Are you having fun without me?” 

He laughs, the sound wheezy and genuine. “Not this time. Fixin’ a loose board on the front steps.” Wood creaks, and he sighs, the sound of him running his hand over his jaw, catching on the bristles of his beard so clear, you feel like you’re there with him. “So. You need somethin’ from me, darlin’? Sure you’re all right?”

The air turns cool as you step out of the sun and into the concreted shade of the parking garage, the earthy, damp smell of cool stone, cut by an acrid undercurrent of motor oil and exhaust fumes. 

Electric excitement snaps beneath your skin. 

The slam of your car echoes through the busy garage. “What if I said I did?” You ask, tossing your bag into the passenger seat, slotting your keys into the ignition. “Need you?” 

“Guess I’d come find you.”

You smile to yourself, feeling stupidly self satisfied with his answer, fidgeting with your keys, and then the tiny wooden figurine that sits in your now rarely used ashtray. Smoking is a rarity these days for both of you.  

Joel had given it to you the weekend before Christmas, though he didn’t say it was a Christmas gift, just handed it to you on your way out the door, wrapped in white tissue paper with a surprisingly neat bow. 

You suspect he’d been embarrassed about it, tips of his ears red, mumbling something under his breath as he ushered you more quickly than he would have otherwise to your car. You’d unwrapped it before you drove home, a tiny wooden sparrow rolling into the palm of your hand, clearly whittled by hand.

It had taken your breath away, beautiful in a way that was beyond words, and because your own thoughts had tumbled back into your head. There’s no way Joel could know that you’d first thought of him as a sparrow, your sparrow.  

You’d put the bird carefully in your recently cleaned out ashtray and felt the urge to cry, wondering if that was how he saw you. Not the wily, predaceous cat, but the little bird.

Guilt had followed the unwrapping, a familiar weight on your tongue. Joel said it wasn’t a gift when you called to thank him, just that he’d thought of you while he hand carved something for you, so you should have it. I’ll pay you back next time, you purred, and the silence had lasted so long you started to feel bad. 

Neither of you had acknowledged Valentine’s Day after that, and despite the awkwardness the little bird has become sort of talisman, something to hold onto when you worried. 

“I received some good news today,” you continue after a moment, “and I guess I just wanted someone to know that I did.” 

“Well,” he rumbles, his voice earnest and warm. It’s like bottling the feeling of home, and you press the phone more tightly to your face, like it might really bring you closer to him. “Go on then. Tell me about it.” 

You twist the key in the ignition and bite your lip. The engine sputters to life, thruming against your thighs, the soles of your feet. “Would you be very upset with me if I said I wanted to tell you in person this weekend?” 

“Nah, darlin’” he coos teasingly. “I’m never upset with you. You tell me whenever you want to. Call me, too. Goddamn step can wait.” 

“I just,” you suddenly feel the need to explain yourself, for interrupting his day, fixing your hand more tightly around the little carving. It pinches your skin. “I guess I just wanted to hear your voice. You’re the first person I wanted to tell.” 

There’s a long pause, the echo of his breathing down the line, the mirror of your own slowing to match his. “Can’t wait to hear it. Whatever it is, you know I’m proud of you.” 

Maybe that’s why you called him, permission to be proud of yourself. Your shoulders relax against the seat. “I’m going to drive home now. Will you keep talking to me?” 

“Yep.” 

“Will you let me talk you off when I get home?” 

He laughs again, warm and strained. “Only if you want to.” 

“I’d do it now,” you say, putting him on speakerphone and dropping your phone into the cup holder. “But I think it might be dangerous to touch myself and drive.” 

You can tell he’s rolling his eyes by the silence and grunt of suppressed laughter that follows. “What am I gonna do with you?” 

“I’d wear my seatbelt at least.” 

“Well,” he sighs, long suffering, “at least there’s that.” 

.

.

.

Joel manages to head Tommy off until well after the holidays, for months. 

He knows his brother is going to say something to him about you, can scent it in the air like blood after a kill. He reckons Maria won’t let it go, but every time it looks like Tommy might say something, he manages to distract him, or put him off it. 

Surprise arrivals of Ellie to the ranch had helped a couple times. Tommy clearly didn’t want to bring it up in front of her, and Joel’s glad his brother has that much tact at least. 

After the rush of the holidays had settled, Tommy had been on a job out of town, and so weeks went by, without mention of you or the drive-in. 

Texas’s short winter passed with barely a whimper, and spring slotted back into place like it had never left. 

The first few months of the year pass easily. Cotton candy sunsets, warm evenings, the smell of citrus in the dust laden air, Friday evenings spent with you. There’s something panic stricken in your features when he meets you, but it eases away, melts into the smile he knows so quickly, that he forgets about it until the next time he sees you and the cycle repeats. 

Joel forgets, too, the incident at the drive-in. He ignores the part of him that knows he should interrogate your age, just so he knows how old you really are. 

He knows you’d lied about your age, and has mostly made peace with the notion that you’re likely a little younger than what you told him the night he met. You’d had good reason to lie, he knows that, had known it already, even before you told him details of the men you’d been with before. The admission of what it had been like for you like a hand carved heartbeat pressed into the palm of his hand. He wants to make sure another finger is never laid on you. 

The rest of it though, he’s steadfastly ignored. There’s a niggling worry in the back of his mind, that everything else has been a lie too. That maybe he’s laying his affection down where there wasn’t room for it, that the space doesn’t even exist, that who you are with him is a play you’ve been acting in, that he’s only a member of your audience. 

Those couple weeks you’d been parted before the drive-in, not taking his calls, cancelling a weekend or two, he’d been sure you were going to end things. Maybe another man had come along, offering more than he could, though he’s offered more money you’ve refused to take. 

Or, maybe you’re tired of living this particular piece of fiction with him, a desperate, stressed out student, too smart for her own good.

If he was a different man, would you have fed him a different story? The answer is so obviously yes it pains him to think about. Every word, every twist of your wrist, every carefully placed limb, had been an elaborate act to make him comfortable, to make him want you. 

It had been, at least. The act had mostly fallen away, snapping up like a shield only when you felt uncertain.  

Or, he thinks it’s fallen away. 

He feels like a dirty old man for thinking it, but you don’t seem young. There’s a maturity to you, an experience and understanding of the world that has been grappled with and fought for, like you’ve lived more years, more lifetimes, than you’ve needed to. 

Maybe he’s just speeding that along, stealing more of your youth. 

One balmy Thursday night near the end of March, Joel settles on his front porch with his guitar, the sound of your voice tinny over his phone’s speaker still winding around his mind, the ribbon of it stitching him together, pulling apart fleshy parts of himself he didn’t know existed. 

The promise of a secret shared tomorrow evening, some good news you’d received, something you want him to know first. A silly burst of pride over it.  

The sun hasn’t quite set, golden orange light playing against the tops of the flowering trees in undulating waves. 

Green is returning to the world again in thick, lush sheaves.  

He’d like to invite you back to the ranch, so you can see it at its best, ride Whiskey again, see the freedom and peace reflected in your eyes.

Maybe for your birthday. Maybe that’d be a good enough opening to tell you he knows you’re younger than you say you are, and work from there, work out all the rest of it, see if he’s as delusional as he thinks he might be. 

He plucks out a slow, lovestruck tune, something his mama used to listen to on the radio, looking up at the slowly rising moon on the darkening horizon, thinking of what he’d play for you, if he ever got the chance, what he’d sing. You said once, you’d like to hear him sing. 

The slow return of the night bugs to the grass hums a melody back to him. 

He thinks better with something to occupy his hands, like his mind feels free to wander to other places. It calms him too, settles the turbulent roll of emotion playing across his chest that he doesn’t dare examine at too closely, or name, still hearing the thready whispered sighs of your voice, the sultry curl of it in his ear, talking him to an orgasm, the arch of your moan matching his. 

It had felt like an offering, a consolation prize for calling him and not telling him your news. He isn’t really sure how you don’t know that you could call to talk about paint drying and he’d sit there and listen to every agonizing, monotonous detail. 

He’s still thinking about that when gravel crunches beneath the tires of a car coming up the driveway, headlights flashing in the evening light. 

A few minutes later, Tommy emerges from the encroaching darkness and lumbers onto the porch. His brother greets him far too casually and moseys inside with a clatter of the screen door. 

Joel sighs heavily, can sense there will be no turning Tommy off the subject this time. He gets to his feet and follows him inside. 

“Cherry,” Tommy hums, drawing your name out as he rummages in the fridge. “That gal you were out with at the drive-in. How come you ain’t brought her around?”

Tommy says your name in his house like its no small shock, no big fucking deal. Joel wants to snatch it out of the air, stuff it into his back pocket, not because he’s ashamed but to keep it safe, because he doesn’t want to deal with justifying himself to his little brother, doesn’t want a goddamn soul to even think of staining your name. 

The air feels heavy, a crackle of electricity ringing around the ceiling. “She’s busy, usually,” Joel answers, which is true, if not entirely honest. “Works a lot.”

“She seemed real sweet.” Tommy says, emerging from the depths of the fridge with a beer, leaning against the counter as he cracks it open with a bottle opener from the drawer to his left. “Surprised though. Little young for you, ain’t she? Tess’d probably think it’s funny.” 

“Yeah,” Joel says, something tense locking up the muscle in his neck and shoulders at the mention of Tess. He leans the guitar against the table, nodding. “Yeah, probably.”

“Maybe too young,” he continues. “Maria ain’t let me forget about it since we saw you with her.” 

His little brother sits at the kitchen table and kicks one foot up on it, tilting the chair back on two legs the way he always has. “So,” he slaps a hand against his thigh, “how’d y’all meet anyway?” 

Even though he knew the question was coming, it still makes him grit his jaw, the tension in his neck transitions into a headache. 

Joel considers lying, making something up, as he sits across from Tommy. But it feels like he’d be shaming you, so he doesn’t. He tells Tommy the truth, or most of it. His brother’s eyebrows almost touch his hairline. 

“You serious?” 

“Now, Tommy, I know what it looks like—.” 

He scoffs. 

Joel bristles. 

“You ain’t even gonna let me finish?” 

He shrugs. “This ain’t like you, Joel. Since when are you that fuckin’ gullible?” 

“It ain’t like that.” 

“Like hell it ain’t. How old is she anyway?” He doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to dignify it but he’s faced starkly with the fact that he just doesn't really know. “How old?” When Joel still doesn’t answer, Tommy shakes his head. “You don’t know? Jesus Christ, Joel. Maria was right. You gotta realize how fuckin’—”

“Tommy,” he growls, a warning.

“You pay her for that day we saw you? To see a movie with you?”

Joel grits his jaw. “Tommy—”

“Uh-huh. She’s a whore, Joel. She’s supposed to make you feel special, or did you forget that somewhere along the way? How much money she gotten out of you?”  

“Shut your goddamn mouth, Tommy. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” 

Tommy shakes his head, takes another long draft from his beer before he leans forward, foot falling off Joel’s kitchen table, chair legs smacking down into the floor. “I know you been through a lot the last couple years, Sarah and Tess. All that stuff with Ellie. Anna comin’ back. Grief. . .does strange things. I told Maria this whole thing’d pass sooner or later, just give you some time but—”

“Tommy,” he snaps, and this time his brother does stop talking, looking intently at him from across the table. “You don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talkin’ about.” He’s repeating himself, ignoring the question, ignoring the pulse of truth. That maybe he had been too willing to put on blinders, indulge in the desperate, grief-tangled parts of himself that wanted to feel better, and ashamed that he wanted to feel any way but miserable.

“Now, listen, we all felt the loss—”

“What do you know about loss?” he snarls. “You lose half your goddamn family in one fuckin’ day or did I miss it?” 

There’s an unsteady feeling in his chest, pressing hard beneath his lungs. “I heard you out,” he says before Tommy can get another word in. “Now leave it.” 

“I take back what I said. Tess would be fuckin’ shamed. She is.” He says, getting to his feet, plunking the beer down onto the table. Tommy knew when a conversation with him had run its course, and how bull headed he could be too.

 Joel stands and Tommy takes a step back, toward the door.

“Watch yourself now, Joel. Listen, I don’t know nothin’ about her, so I can’t really say. I’m sure she’s a nice girl.” The emphasis makes Joel wince, sets his teeth on edge. “That’s a whole issue on its own. But you’re probably gettin’ duped and you’re blind to it because you’re fuckin’ lonely. I get it, but you gotta pull your head out of your ass.”  

The door slams shut behind him, and Joel is left with the sinking, itching feeling that Tommy is right, his own thoughts reflected back at him in his brother’s words, delivered with a punch, the notion that you could exploit his grief.

You wouldn’t. He knows you better than that, but the confrontation leaves him wondering, leaves him remembering that first night with you.

The memory punched out of his mind like holes into a ticket, long lost words careening back into focus, how quickly he’d offered up his grief, his hesitancy about your age, about being with a prostitute at all. 

If you were a different kind of man I’d guess I’d tell you I’m freshly eighteen and you would believe it.

So what kind of lies do you tell a man like Joel to make him comfortable, to contort yourself into the right fantasy, he wonders again? 

Maybe all of it. 

.

.

.

The sky is a clear crystal baby blue when you climb out of your car that Friday afternoon. The air is hot and dry, hazy where the sky meets the earth in blurred lines of red heat. 

You hurry across the parking lot and then the cool inner lobby, picking up the key card from the receptionist who smiles at you and slides it across the wood. She’s kinder than the previous one had been. If she judges you, she at least doesn’t show her disdain to your face. 

The words flutter behind your lips, and for once you want to say them. You’re excited to see him, tell him your good news, come clean about your age. 

The brass door handle is cool beneath your touch, the caress of cold air that swirls out to meet you raising gooseflesh along your arms. 

“Hey, cowboy,” you breathe, chest and throat locking up when you see him, sitting ostensibly no differently than he ever had before, in jeans and t-shirt, elbow on his knees. The words stiffen and knot in your mouth before you swallow and they loosen again, liquid warmth in your mouth and veins. It will feel good, to have the knot of nerves in your gut unfurl, loosen, flatten into nothing. 

It says nothing of the elation you feel that you have someone to tell about your candidacy, to share in your accomplishment, to call you smart and deserving and so persistent and resilient. The words would feel so nice, would taste delicious on your tongue, passed from his mouth to yours, slippery and warm. 

“I want to—there’s something we—”

But as soon as your bag hits the floor, Joel is pressing you back into the door, his mouth on yours in a rarely shown desperation. If it’s a little rougher than usual, a little more demanding, you don’t mind.

You loop your arms around his neck, let the words settle at the back of your throat. 

His jeans are unbuttoned and half unzipped, the skin of his lower stomach taut and warm against your fingertips when you skim your hands down his chest.  

“Joel,” you whisper against his mouth, what you wanted to say lost to the lust being stoked in your belly. You grasp at the rapidly receding firaments, grasping at straws until they all disappear. “Hold on, I—”

He stops long enough to give you a moment to breathe. “You all right?” 

“Yeah,” you murmur, hooking your fingers into the loops of his jeans. It can wait, the things you want to say to him nest again at the bottom of your lungs, content to wait for the right moment. “Yes.” 

Joel cups his hand against your jaw, looking at you like he’s searching for something in your features. You expect some kind of reassurance, the softening of his edges, but he just kisses you again. 

He walks backward with you until his knees hit the edge of the bed, running his hands over your sides and the curve of your thighs. 

Joel rucks your skirt up, so you can slot your knees on either side of his hips, broad palms and fingers hooking against the back of your thighs, cupping the curve of your ass, squeezing until you shimmy forward, until you’re pressed so closely together, you swear you can feel the pulse of his heart against yours. 

He doesn’t look at you when he reaches beneath your skirt to tug your underwear to the side, rub two fingers through your folds. You’re just wet enough that the familiar stretch of his cock is a pleasant ache, though you can help feeling he usually would have touched you more, taken his time with you.

There’s something distant about the way he touches you, a remoteness that you can’t exactly place, an agitatedness that puts you on edge. Maybe it’s just the desperation, the unfamiliar, urgent spread of his fingers against your spine, pressing in a way that he hasn’t been before, at least not with you. Squeezing too tight, adjusting your limbs with too sudden jerks. 

You slide your fingers across the back of his neck, threading the tips through his dark graying hair. He looks at you but doesn’t meet your eyes, cupping your jaw in his hand, thumb swiping across your mouth until you part your lips. 

He presses two fingers past your lips, strokes them against your tongue until you gag slightly and grab his wrist. His murmured praise is enough to let him do it again, sucking until he groans and pulls his hand away, swiping away the spit from your lips. 

Joel tugs at the hem of your shirt instead, until you lift your arms, peeling it off you, flinging it to the end of the bed, fingers digging into your hips, rocking you forward against him. 

His hands travel upwards, cupping around your tits, mouth traveling from your lips to your throat.

You gasp when he pinches your nipples into peaks. 

The sound draws his eyes, gaze hooking into yours. A hard breath leaves him. 

You frown when he presses his forehead to your sternum. “Oh, Christ,” he mutters against your skin. 

You lace your fingers against the back of his head, holding him there for a long moment, wondering what happened. “Something’s wrong.” You say softly. “You okay?” 

He nods. 

And when he glances up again the ragged desperation has gentled into something calmer. You stroke his cheek, feel his cock twitch inside you. “Can I take this off?” You murmur, winding your fingers into his t-shirt in half anguished fists. 

A realization plucked like a false note in the back of your mind, how often you were bare, how often he was not. 

But he nods and acquiesce, dropping the material to the floor, you run your fingers across his chest, the tickle of wiry chest hair beneath the pads of your fingers, a delicious scrap against your sensitive nipples when you lean in close. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” You ask when he flattens his palm between your shoulder blades and ruts against you, holding you close to him. 

Something caused this, you’re fairly certain of it. An ache gnaws at the lining of your stomach, that perhaps the borrowed time had finally cashed in. 

“Mm.” His hand sweeps down your spine, before he twists your bodies in an impressive show of strength, pressing your back flat to the mattress. “Gimme your leg,” he says, voice less strained than before. “Ankle here.” 

You almost make a joke, if he’s too old for something like that, but there’s something so serious in his features that it dies on your tongue. He’s so quiet, he’s normally more vocal, talks to you.

Joel pushes back inside you slowly. The angle is deeper than you’re used to, but he goes slowly enough that the stretch never turns into a burn. The first shallow thrust touches something that makes your eyes roll back, the second makes you moan and grip his arm, the hand circled around your calf, keeping your leg against his chest. 

You fold your other leg against his hip, spreading yourself wider, reaching for him, begging him to slot closer to you. 

The far away feeling hasn’t quite dissipated, but it creases and hides when he leans down over you, pushing the aching muscles in your thigh to its near limit. 

He grunts in your ear, the echo of the central air shutting off matching the panting caress of your breath. “Baby,” you think he murmurs, so low the word is almost nothing, just the brush of his breath against your skin.

Hand curled against the side of your neck, he fucks you deep and slow, every inch of him felt as he pulls away and thrusts back into you. A moan builds in your throat that you don’t feel able to expel, something tight tangled around your lungs. You tits bounce with every snap of his hips, until he finally lowers your leg to match the other curled at his hip. 

You cross your ankles at the small of his back, encouraging him closer, to fuck you deeper. His skin is warm against yours, slick with salt. Joel rubs his thumb across the underside of your chin, the line of your jaw. 

He threads one arm beneath your back to tilt your hips up, sucks bruises kisses into your skin when he bows his head. A flattening curve along your collarbone and down to your chest, tongue laving over one nipple and then the other. 

Joel’s hand slides away from your neck to rub your clit, grunting against your mouth, the scent of him and sex so thick in the air it chokes you, salt and leather and lemon. 

The pressure squeezing around the base of your spine unwinds all at once, a terrible, aching pulse that spools out in every direction crossed with desire and affection and something else you’re dangerously close to admitting. 

You feel it when he comes, the tense of his shoulders beneath your hands, the straining muscle of his back and neck, the hot pressure and twitch of his cock. Pretty, when he comes inside you, eyes scrunched, mouth parting gently.

He collapses against you, cursing beneath his breath, strands of his hair sticking to your chest. You wrap your arms around his head and think maybe the distance, the remoteness, you’d felt were just your imagination. You stoke his hair, think about saying your name, feel the warm puff of his breath over your skin, slow and familiar. 

His skin is tacky with sweat, strands of hair plastered to the back of his neck, shimmering in the hollow of his throat, at his wrists and the too pretty curve of his biceps. 

You could spend forever looking at him, instead you get only a moment. 

The afternoon sunlight is still so bright, a ringing, glittering halo around his mussed hair. You’d arrived so early in the afternoon, with the intention to. . .you have so much to tell him. 

“Joel—” 

Confusion curls around the edges of your mind, tugs you up out of the haze of post sex dopamine bliss, when he pulls away from you, the circle of your arms going cold, the place where his head just rested crusting over with ice. 

He sits at the edge of the bed, broad back rising and falling steadily, muscle flicking and rolling beneath his sun washed skin, veiny, competent hands reaching for his t-shirt, tugging it over his head. 

“Joel?”

His back tenses; he stands. 

Of all the cruel things men have done and said after using your body, abusing you in so many ways, this hurts the most, Joel getting out of bed so quickly, not looking at you. 

The sting doesn’t make sense, not at first. Like your body understands before your mind does. 

“How old are you?” 

The blood rushes out of your face so quickly, you feel faint, sitting up, yanking at the sheet unit you can cover your chest. A dirty, used, humiliated feeling follows. 

“Birthday comin’ up, right?” He continues, pulling his jeans up his thighs, buttoning them slowly. He doesn’t look at you. “We met end of March last year. Birthday is comin’ up. So you turned twenty-eight last year, right after we met.” 

The chill over your heart spreads, rushes through your chest until your lungs struggle to draw breath. 

“Joel—” you whisper. “Wait, wait, this is—I wanted to—”

“So you’re turnin’ twenty-nine.” 

His features betray a desperation when he turns, a crisis of faith that cuts you to your core. “Joel—”

“Cherry.”

There’s something incredibly unfair about it. This isn’t the first time he’s done this to you, ambushed you after sex when your defenses were down. Because he’s feeling vulnerable and raw, emotions too close to the surface of his skin, or because you are and he’s hoping the truth will be more readily available to him?

You don’t want to believe it’s the latter, but it’s hard to convince yourself it’s anything else. 

You can feel his cum leaking out of you, can still feel the warm imprint of his hands on your waist, the last gentle, whiskered kiss he pressed to your mouth. You can still feel the lingering burn of it, the new meaning of it. 

He’s begging you to say he’s right, of course he is. He wants you to laugh, say of course you never lied about your age. But you’re already shaking your head. 

“I wanted to tell you—I was—” You stop and swallow, dry throat scraping and clogged with too many words, crowding to get out, not sure what to say first. Your tongue feels cottony and fat and too large for your mouth. “So many times, but I—”

“Tell me now,” he says gruffly and you flinch. “Jesus Christ.”

You close your eyes, summoning the courage to blow it all up. There’s something caged about him, a beast pulling at his chain. The desperation makes sense, he’s already made up his mind about you. Just a lying whore he wanted the truth out of for once. It’s as you knew it would be, one detail would crumble the foundation, everything you said after would be examined and held to the light and be found wanting.  

“I’ll be twenty-four,” you murmur eventually. “In two weeks.” 

Joel paces the length of the room, agitated, hands on his hips. But he doesn’t leave, doesn’t tell you to get the hell out, and so hope blossoms weakly in your heart. A chance. Maybe you have a chance to explain.

You open your mouth to say something, to say anything, to ask if it mattered. 

That moment a year ago, that decision, made in a vacuum you could not have guessed the vastness of, that it would lead, eventually, here. 

 “Anything you said to me real this past year? Or has it all been a little act?”

“How would I—What do you—?” 

“Grief,” he answers sharply. “Just what kinda sob story works on what type of man.” 

This is the ultimate confirmation of what you’d already known. Joel is just like any other man, he’s just taken longer than most in showing it. 

It hurts worse than you could have imagined, though you knew it would be the logical conclusion he would arrive at eventually. 

Everything else has been real, painfully, horrifyingly, nakedly real. He knows you better than anyone else, and he isn’t convinced it’s the truth. 

You think of the photos on his living room walls, all the places you thought you might fit in, given the chance, all the pieces of himself he’d never shared. All the things you shared that he now thinks are lies. 

Maybe the age difference could have been resolved. But the implication that you curated what you said to prise money from his fingers, can’t be. 

You shrug, feeling the broken, ragged pieces of your rasp against the inside of your skin. The dirty, used feeling fades in the wake of a hungry numbness. 

“We should end—” he gestures vaguely with one hand toward you, flippantly, with one lifted brow, barely looking at you as he says it, “—whatever the hell this is.” 

The room seems to shrink, the walls pushing in slowly, hurt blooming like a bruise over your heart. You feel like you can’t breathe, like you might have a panic attack or a heart attack. You manage one shaky breath and then another before that familiar, safe removed feeling cocoons you carefully away. Like you’re watching how this plays out from outside your body, floating above it all. “Okay.” 

Joel stops pacing and you hold the sheet hard to your chest, bracing again, waiting. 

If he’s finally seeing you as you are, maybe he’d treat you that way too. 

And he’s so angry. 

You think he’s angry, and Joel has never been angry with you before. You don’t know what to do with his anger, how it might manifest to you, on you. 

He scoffs. “So that’s it then? You ain’t even gonna say anything? Ain’t even gonna deny it?”

You can’t parse the tone of his voice, anxious and pleading, maybe, more than angry. But you don’t trust yourself with him, to see him clearly, not anymore. 

What would it accomplish anyway? Maybe he wants to ridicule you, snap back with evidence of his own that you’re lying, that you’re still lying, that none of it mattered.

Your shirt is still at the end of the bed where Joel had flung it. You claw it on with shaking hands, your fingers and the lines in your palms unrecognizable, like they belong to someone else, and lurch across the room to your bag, yanking your skirt down and underwear back into place as you go. Humiliation and grief and shame rush through you all at once, a self-hatred so intense that you think, distantly, it might be worth it to let him hurt you. You’d deserve it.  

The air feels heavy, like you’re moving through syrup, thick and viscous, quicksand sucking at your ankles. It seems to take forever to reach the door, to loop around Joel, who suddenly seems so large, like he takes up the whole room, shadowy and hulking. 

“Hey—” 

Joel’s voice is far away, distant, echoing as if from down a long tunnel, from underwater. Maybe it sounds softer, you don’t know. Time feels immaterial and long, like it’s rushing by and crawling to a halt all at once. 

“Darlin’? You hear me?” 

To think you wanted to speak your name into his ear, let it curl safely in his chest, a new home for it. How fucking pathetic. 

You feel dizzy but you’re glad, distantly, that you can’t hear him, can’t hear whatever words he’s hurling at you.  

“Cherry—” His voice snaps like sudden gunfire, like you’re wretched suddenly and against your will from beneath the surface of that safe riptide. 

Joel hooks his hand in your elbow. “Honey, listen,—”

A hard learned lesson emerges from the depth of your stomach, and instinct kicks in, the ghosts of so many angry men sucking the air from the room, so many phantom grasping hands crawling along your skin. 

You jerk out of his grasp so violently that you slam your shoulder into the frame of the door. The pain barely registers, but the safe, hazy film of dissociation can’t protect you from the look that flashes over his face.

Regret, shame. 

Then you feel stupid for seeing it that way, as though he would feel regret and shame over someone like you. 

You want to cry. 

You won’t cry. 

You cannot cry in front of him. 

You haven’t cried in front of a man since the first few weeks at the club and you will not start again now. But you can feel them, thick and ready to fall, at the backs of your eyes, hot beading pressure that doesn’t dissipate when you blink rapidly. 

“No,” your voice is a sudden, vicious little snarl, a cornered, frightened thing. “Don’t. Don’t touch me.” 

You swallow and back away from him, shaking your head as you go, reaching blindly behind you for the door handle. “You’re right. It wasn’t fucking real,” you shrug, like there isn’t shattered glass lodged in your lungs from your broken heart. “I’m a whore, Joel. I’m nothing but a whore. I told you that. That’s all I am.” 

His face goes blank. 

His hand drops from your arm. 

“Then I guess we ain’t got nothin’ to say to each other.” 

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

price who needs a reminder. cw. dubcon photo sharing. manipulation/coercion.

thinking about price kissing you as you float in post orgasm, coarse hands drifting over your hips and roll you too your back. overwhelms you with his sheer size, paws holding the garter of your thigh and chest hair itching your sheening skin and burning the place on your neck where he sucks. let’s you grind deliriously over the heel of his palm while you collect the collapsed bassinet of your senses.  

in this lullaby, you are pliant.

of course you nod when he asks you “gonna miss this, hm? gonna miss me on your sweet little cunt?” rewards you with a gentle push of his palm, which ignites the bundle of nerves that have given too much tonight. “i’m gonna miss it too darlin…miss it so much.”

and when he says, “might need a reminder, yeah? know what i have waitin’ for me…” you’re so obedient. shift your hips forward and sigh when the relief of his hand balms your center, nodding mindlessly. but he pulls it away and steals you from stupor when he grabs your chin and forces you to swallow the atlanic of his eyes.

“now now sweet’eart, none of that. i wanna hear you give me what i want,” he smiles and you drown, “say you’ll let me take a reminder. keep this moment forever, yeah?”

you’re nodding then, and you’re still nodding when he’s posing for you for pictures. bending your limbs, the clay before it’s put in the kiln. nodding when he feeds you his cock again agonizingly slow, and when you feel yourself as not a body but a pulse. thrums on the spit he swaps with yours and the slick that covers his torso. plummets when you see how it glistens in the camera flash.

in the soreness of the morning, you’re forgiving. sheepish as he packs his final bags and makes him promise that those photos are “between us”. melts and pulses when he kisses your forehead and brushes away worries that sprout from your scalp, and says, “of course, darling.”

he doesn’t correct your perception of “us”. doesn’t call it limited. doesn’t tell you he had already promised his best dogs a bone. how they’re drooling like your cunt in the photos he slips into their flak jackets. watching their festering desire with a cigar on his teeth, and hearing it satisfied when he presses an ear to their barrack doors. he smiles to himself, flipping his favorite of your blissed out sleeping face between his index and middle while he returns to his office after his night rounds.

you make him- and his men- very happy.

[dreamtofus]

CALL OF THE SEA - MASTERLIST

Pirate 141 x F!Reader

When a group of unhinged pirates invade your small village, you're whisked away from your peaceful home and thrown on to a voyage out at sea. Forced to obtain a new role as their medic, you have no choice but to accept your fate as you join their forces and aid them in their treacherous travels.

Updates every Saturday unless said otherwise.

> Spotify Playlist

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Part Twelve

Part Thirteen

Part Fourteen

Part Fifteen

Part Sixteen

Part Seventeen

Part Eighteen

[dreamtofus]

Art by farahfriday

𝐀𝐱 𝐆𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 (𝟏𝟖+) - 𝐆𝐚𝐳/𝐅𝐞𝐦 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 - 𝐙𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐞 𝐀𝐩𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐔

Part 1 - Beaver

Part 2 - Dandelions

Part 3 - Dove

Part 4 - The Town

Part 5 - Tampons

Part 6 - Blood

Part 7 - Rain

Part 8 - Footsteps

Status of the next update

I don't do tag lists, but users can subscribe on AO3

Fan stuff:

Ax Grinder Hype by farahfriday

⬅️ Back to COD main page

[dreamtofus]

𝐀𝐱 𝐆𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 (𝟏𝟖+)

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝟕 - 𝐑𝐚𝐢𝐧

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick/Fem Reader Zombie apocalypse AU (all parts here)

CW: Reader is hit in the face

It’s a moment every animal knows — the instant you comprehend that you’re in imminent peril, and your brain makes the decision between fight, flight, or freeze.

It’s not a conscious choice that propels you to act, but you do. You smack your fist down as hard as you can on top of his knuckles, over and over amidst a mindless frenzy to wrench the ax away from his control, digging your knees into the dirt and heaving—

You get free so suddenly, the momentum lands you flat on your back, knocking the wind out of you in one solid whoosh. If you were a trained fighter you might know that this is when you have to move, even when you feel like you can’t. You have to kill him now, before you can even draw a breath, before he has a chance to recover and retrieve your only weapon.

But you’ve never fought anyone in your life, and in those few seconds of panic over your lungs locking up, Gaz materializes on top of you.

His arms are trembling, even as he efficiently pins you to the ground. You can only assume it’s his muscles giving out from the exertion of killing half a dozen people in the span of an hour. But his fingers are iron, clamping around your wrist in a way that shoots a sharp pain through your arm, right as you’re able to suck in your first gulp of oxygen.

The agony is too much. Your hand spasms open, and you’re forced to drop the ax with a yelp, as invisible splinters of repulsion shoot through your nervous system.

You can’t get away.

He’s touching you with his murder hands, huffing his hateful breath into your neck as he flings the ax out of your reach, landing in the grass with a soft thump. The fact that he doesn’t want to immediately kill you with it sends another, stronger wave of dread through your belly. You’re alone out here, surrounded only by the corpses that are proof of his cruel nature.

He’s so heavy, and you’re so tired.

Gaz seems to sense the change in your body when you give up. Your muscles go limp as tears of despair prick at your eyes, and all you can do is turn your face away from his.

“You,” he pants, loosening his grip to restrain you mostly with his body weight, “are not an easy person to find.”

Tears begin spilling out over your nose, even as you screw your eyes shut as tight as you can. You walked right into his trap, and it’s all your fault.

Now you’re both shaking. You’re both high on adrenaline and low on energy, vibrating against each other while he catches his breath and decides what to do with you. Your thoughts should be racing, coming up with escape routes and plans, but they’re not. You’re locked onto the one inevitability that’s been nipping at your heels all these months: you’re dead.

Fate has finally caught you in a misstep, and you’re going to die now. You can’t help but picture the worst case scenarios, flipping rapidly through your brain like a horror movie highlight reel, terror closing up your throat.

You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.

Gaz is saying something, but you can’t process it. The air has become too thick to breathe, too thick to hear or see. Stuttered half-sobs wrack your chest, cramping your muscles into tight knots. Desperately you try to suck more oxygen, breaths coming faster once Gaz’s weight lifts off of you. You lay there uselessly on the ground, light-headed and tunnel visioned with despair as you gasp over and over—

Smack.

Pain radiates across your face so suddenly, all the autonomy shoots back into your limbs like a lightning bolt. You’re not sure if it’s the sting that brings you back, or the blind outrage that he just slapped you.

“We’ve got to go,” Gaz orders.

“W-what?” The hot imprint of his hand throbs on your cheek as you blink stupidly at the shadow above you.

“There’s blood everywhere, we’re going to have biters here in an hour. I’m not going to hurt you, just— just fucking breathe, idiot. We’ve got to move.”

You can feel his knees on either side of your thighs, feel his arms shaking beside your shoulders like he’s just hunched over you, waiting for reality to sink into your brain.

Finally you find your voice, even if it’s a weak, disbelieving croak. “You hit me.”

”Sorry.” He doesn’t sound at all sorry. He sounds urgent and annoyed, as if he resents the two seconds it took to say it.

Helpless tears well up in your eyes again. You should never have survived this long, this was a mistake. You should have let the first one get you, when you watched that fresh biter stumble around your apartment lobby for the first time. Should have offered your own flesh and given up immediately, to avoid all of this.

“I don’t have any tampons,” you whisper, swiping at your eyes.

“Got them packed away. Come on.”

Finally Gaz gets to his feet, and before you can even muster the energy to sit up, he hoists you upright by your armpits.

Your head immediately spins with the sudden reorientation and lack of food. He must sense your wobbling because he holds you steady for longer than necessary, until you flinch away from his touch.

“Get your bag, get as much food as you can carry on the move,” Gaz instructs, his dark outline bending down to grab something from the dirt. “I want to be out of here in five minutes.”

—————————

The rain makes everything so much worse.

It’s a steady drizzle by the time you’ve got your things packed, and you’re bundled up as best you can with all of your jackets layered damply together.

It won’t be enough. You’re going to get soaked through in an hour, and then you’re going to die because wet and cold means dead out here. You’re still not sure why you’re alive, why any of it matters at all, but being assigned a task has unfortunately put you in work mode.

Gaz is waiting for you at the edge of the trees. “Here,” he says when you join him, pressing a piece of clothing into your hand.

It’s a coat of some sort, sturdy and thick enough to make you think it might be waterproof.

“Stop at the gift shop on the way out?” you grumble, exchanging your least favorite jacket for the new layer.

“Something like that.”

Impatient with your speed, he tugs the straps of your pack into place for you, clipping it across your chest and making an annoyed sound in his throat. “Come on, then.”

It rains all night.

Your saving grace really is that waterproof layer, keeping your trunk warm and dry while the rest of you becomes sopping wet. You must be going slower than normal, because you’re not thirty minutes into your journey before Gaz pulls you aside under a thick evergreen and forces food and caffeine pills into you.

That’s when the true misery kicks in, when you have enough brain power to soak in how fucking wretched you are. Everything is soggy and dark, and your body is so tired. One step after another, your feet find their way where they’re supposed to go, and your mind wanders to stupid, irrelevant places.

You fantasize that you’re not actually trailing along behind a mass murderer in the dark woods. It’s actually not raining, and the group is still alive for you to hate. You’re going through those houses again in the dark, finding cabinets full of tampons, and every food and supply you could possibly need. You take the time to coat your body in some designer lotion brand, and you even catch a few hours of sleep on someone’s king-sized, memory foam mattress.

The hallucination continues as you walk, becoming more and more ridiculous until you’re creating fake scenarios of your new life in a sanctuary city. It’s the dream you’ve held all these months, that some day you’ll find a place safe and warm, with rules and laws and stability.

You’d be able to let your guard down, and fall in love with someone handsome and tall. Really tall. He’d keep you under his protection and teach you how to fight, like all those fantasy books you read in your past life. You’d finally be able to rest, and have enjoyable sex, and do all the things that humans can only do when they’re not running for their lives.

They’re things you’ll never be able to do again, so you dream of them while you walk through the sodden underbrush, and the thorns, and the slippery roots.

The caffeine has just begun to wear off when Gaz finds somewhere to stop for the remainder of the night. It’s a shallow cave, more of an overhang than anything, and definitely not dry inside. You both have to press into the concave of the rock to find shelter from the rain, unpacking your bed rolls to use as blankets.

And then to your horror, Gaz shuffles up next to you.

“No.” you exclaim, elbowing him away.

“Fuckin’ hell. Not trying to touch you, just getting warm.”

“Get warm over there,” you hiss.

There’s an uncomfortable silence then, which you imagine is him grinding his teeth in the dark, trying to figure out if he should take your body heat by force.

“Now that we’re not walking,” he says finally, in an annoyed rush, “you’re going to cool down very soon and very fast. And I’m not bloody waiting for your little teeth to start chattering before we take— fucking— rational survival measures.”

You clamp your jaw shut to keep your teeth from chattering and sniff pretentiously. “I’m warm enough without you, so it s-sounds like your problem.”

The soft pattering of rain on leaves gives you a sick sense of satisfaction. You hope he’s really cold and really wet, and really, really pissed at you for winning one against him. If he wants what you’re not offering, he’s going to have to take it. He’s going to have to prove, right out in the open, that he’s exactly the person you’ve always known he is, and there will be no denying it.

When he speaks again, his voice is unexpectedly soft and smooth. “Got a… chocolate bar in my pack.”

Your eyes spring open in interest, which quickly changes to a scowl once you realize what he’s doing. “Good for you.”

“It’s… ah.. Snickers. A big one.”

Resist, resist. You ignore the vivid memories of caramel and peanuts, and sniff again. “Just going to brag all night, or can we get some sleep?”

There’s the sound of a zipper, and then the familiar rustle of a candy bar wrapper behind you. You can’t help the way your mouth instantly waters.

“I reckon three hundred calories is a fair enough trade for putting my back against yours.”

Three. Hundred. Calories.

Fuck.

Murders aside, you’d have to be a fool to refuse that offer. Irritated, teeth beginning to chatter, you scoot your ass back on the rocks until you bump into him, and then snatch the candy bar out of his hand. Gaz laughs under his breath at your eagerness, but thankfully doesn’t kick you while you’re down by commenting on it.

You both settle in, spine to spine, and you wait until you’re as comfortable as possible to open your prize.

It’s… indescribably good. It must have been near his body in the bag because it’s wonderfully warm, and buttery soft. You close your eyes and take bites as small as you can, trying to stifle the small moans of pleasure, and failing once or twice.

Between the sugar filling you with dopamine and Gaz’s warm back against yours, you don’t remember falling asleep, with the empty wrapper still clutched in your fingers.

—————————

You wake up with your mouth dry, and your teeth coated in that sugar fuzz from eating before bed. Crinkling your nose, you attempt to go back to sleep before you can wake up any further and notice your various aches and pains.

No use. Your ass hurts from sitting on pebbles, your neck hurts from sleeping semi-upright, and it stinks—

Your heart begins to race as your eyes spring open, and you verify that you are smelling what you think you’re smelling. It’s that unmistakable stench of rotting flesh, like the worst roadkill you’ve ever passed by.

“Gaz,” you whisper, right as the biter stumbles into sight in the woods below.

He’s not awake, you can tell by his slow breathing. Quietly you elbow him, keeping your eyes on the danger. “Wake the fuck up.”

“Mm. What?”

“There’s a biter. Can you shoot it from here?”

Gaz turns his head to peer over, and you both watch the corpse shuffling by, in what you assume is the direction of the bloody camp. Barely recognizable jeans hang off one rotten ankle, leaving the biter in only a tshirt and pink underwear atop sunken, grey skin.

“She’s going the opposite way,” he finally murmurs. “Let her be.”

You open your mouth to argue, because that attitude goes directly against Doran’s philosophy, but then you close it again. Doran’s dead, and you’ve apparently got new rules to learn.

There’s more movement in the trees, and you both soberly watch as five more biters make their way past your hiding spot. Five more arrows you could shoot, that Doran believed would make a dent in the population, if everyone did their part. Gaz apparently sees it as more of a drop in the ocean, which is far more worrisome. Has it really become that bad?

Next Part

Dividers by the-aesthetics-shop

[dreamtofus]

so good

best laid plans

pairing: joel miller x f!sex worker!reader

wc: 9.2k

summary: You attempting quitting with variable results.

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), smut [piv, choking, mentions of fantasized rough sex though none depicted], dissociation, mentions/descriptions of past sex work, hope, anxiety and spiraling thoughts, unhealthy coping methods, language regarding addiction, angst, sugaring, reader is a sex worker, smoking, internalized shame, self deprecation, guilt, emotional vulnerability, poverty

a/n: this was one of those chapters that I had such a clear image of in my mind but turned out the way I wanted it to, so its not a favorite of min. true pain begins next week so enjoy what little hope we have now! as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading!

Quitting is harder than you think. 

Restless anxiety pulses beneath your skin, stretches the boundaries of your concentration. You long for the filmy hazy of blue smoke in the air, the pacifying caress of nicotine beneath your skin. 

The irritation and distraction and sleep deprivation alone make quitting cold turkey an impossibility. You need to be polite and calm and professional at your assistantship; you need to be able to concentrate to study for your impending exams. 

Smoking, aside from the nicotine addiction, is comforting to you. It reminds you of the softer parts of your childhood, your mother’s crooning singing voice, your father’s graveled voice tucking you into bed, the scent of menthols on his shirt when you tucked your face into his chest, the sound of a lighter flicking, the strike of a match outside your bedroom window, your parents talking among the sounds of night as you fell asleep in the summer heat, still sticky from sweat and popsicle residue. 

It comforts you to hold a cigarette between your fingers. It’s a crutch when there’s a lull in conversation, or a prop to start one. You’ve been smoking since you were sixteen, and quitting is easier said than done. It wastes your very limited money; it embraces you in other, more terrible, memories, acrid as tar, poisonous as a snake around your throat, and good ones, the comforting first note of a lullaby.

The smell often gives you a headache but you love it all the same, love the curls of smoke drifting through the air, bleeding through windows and porch screens.

But you don’t want to smell like your mother, don’t want to be reminded of your past each time you light up. You don’t want to wake up and feel like you’re standing exactly where you always have been, just outside your childhood home, waiting for things to be different than they are, for your circumstances to be different than they are, for you to be different than you are. 

When you left Joel the weekend you rode horses, he’d kissed you goodbye like he always does on Sunday afternoons. Your mind had been a turbulent sea of emotional pain that you’d only just managed to keep corralled inside yourself for the remainder of the weekend. 

The crushing, bruising humiliation of finding out just how little he cared to share his real life had found you frantic, chain smoking, tears clogging your throat by the time you got back to your apartment.

You had felt stupid, too, because what should you expect from him? Just because he’d told you about the grief he suffered of his wife, did not mean he wanted some whore with the keys to the grief that so clearly defined him. 

Determination was a necessary lead weight in your chest, chasing away the tears that rimmed your eyes in red, beating away the fragile, immature feelings of failure and shame and a desperation to be loved, to be enough, just fucking once. 

Determination to change something, to follow through on quitting something just to prove to yourself that you could, had overwhelmed you, dried the tears. 

You’re stronger than the desire inside you, the furious, feeble need to be seen and loved.

Joel does not love you, but you feel loved by him, and maybe that’s worse, more devastating, to feel something so obviously and blatantly a lie told by your own mind. It’s nothing short of pathetic. 

You’re not in a movie; good men don’t fall in love with prostitutes. 

Little changes are important in breaking habits, a hasty, frenetic google search had told you that evening. 

So, you’d deep cleaned your apartment that Sunday evening and late into the night, working yourself to the bone, hell bent on not thinking about why you were doing it. Thrown open the windows, scrubbed the yellow nicotine residue from the walls and floors, washed the smell from your curtains and clothes and couch, cycle after cycle of laundry, until your hands were cracked and bleeding and the only thing you could smell was bleach.

You stopped smoking inside—in your apartment, your car. You began to count campus generally as ‘inside’ and stopped smoking there entirely, too. It made the act less convenient, less desirable. You slap a nicotine patch on through the day, do breathing exercises when you feel irritated, and chew gum when you get the itch to smoke. 

It kind of works.

.

.

.

You still smoke in the evenings, though in the parking lot of your apartment building, next to weed choked gravel and dripping, rusted husks of the ancient AC units stuck in first floor windows. 

The same logic can be applied to Joel, you reason, two days later, when the panic finally begins to fade. 

You need to wean yourself away from him, away from the addicting pulse of his attention and affection. 

You have to break the habit of relying on him. 

The next weekend, you cancel on Joel, then reject the money he sends you via a payment app and then his call, too. Busy, you text, with the end of the semester. You send him a fairly tasteless nude later, though, and feel ill and used, even if it was your own doing. A reminder to both of you, that’s what you offer him, your body and sex, but nothing else, ignoring the fact that you can dip into the savings you have, that you have a savings, because of his support. 

No gifts, no dates, no rent money, you tell yourself while avoiding him at every turn. Cash for sex, passionless and demeaning like it should be. 

No careful caress of his hand around your throat, no more giving up something soft, the fragile bones of a bird’s wing, like memories and your anal virginity and saying something stupid in the blissful afterglow.

You stick your hand in your underwear one evening and think of him fucking your mouth, hurting you, holding you hard and rough, coming on your face. You make yourself see him the way all the others treated you, make yourself want it, wish for it, so that the feelings will fade. You come and then cry, guiltily aware that you’re torturing yourself with a version of a man that he’s not, will never be, that you’re losing it.

Maybe some of the instability crashing through you like a bull through a china shop is from the stress of your qualifying exams, the nights you don’t sleep because you’re studying so long and late that you feel lightheaded and dizzy and like you can’t eat, which only makes it all worse. This is what the last two years have been for, every nasty comment, every slap, every twenty dollar bill wadded up and shoved in your bra with a laugh, you can’t lose it now, fail now. 

If you can wipe smoking from your life like a thumb through marker, you can scrub him from it too. If you can sell yourself to make it through school, you can quit him. You’ve done worse, been stronger. 

But, like smoking, you can’t quit him all at once. 

It’s the cardinal sin of a sex worker, getting attached, feeling something for a client that is more likely to hurt you than help you. 

Maybe you can just stop seeing him, disappear back into the underbelly of the club, traipse back through the yawning, soul-sucking maw of that black front door, fuck whoever was there and willing to pay. 

A terrible image comes to your mind, of you ghosting Joel entirely, him coming to find you because he’s worried. His silhouette against the wall of the club, red and pulsing and angry, as you get on your knees for someone else.  

But you can’t, and you deserve the pain in your chest, the raw aching in your hands and knees, for not being able to just let him go. 

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.

.

The hotel is wreathed in holiday lights when you pull into the parking lot, fat green and red bulbs arcing in great swoops over the cars, the ever trickling fountain, threaded between the drooping branches of the orange trees heavy with fruit, twisted around the front columns in a vaguely gaudy way. The pavement is still wet beneath your shoes when you step out of your car from a rare, brief rain that had sprinkled down on the drive over. 

The lights remind you of the lights your father used to string around the porch, and feel out of place wrapped around the expensive exterior of the hotel, among the heavy smell of citrus and petrichor and oil carried on the breeze. 

The engine pops as it cools, and your hands shake with nerves. There’s an open, festering wound in your chest, a hole left open and weeping. Saw toothed and hungry, affection starved, a starving, crying, desperate wolf. 

You turn to examine yourself in the window’s reflection, cupping your tits, wishing they sat a little higher naturally, wondering why it mattered. 

It’s only been a couple weeks. 

You’ve only missed two weekends with him, with a handful of mostly carefully avoided phone calls between, but it feels life months, years. Your skin is desperate, hungry for his touch, his hands on your body, handling you in ways no one else ever has. 

Something you hope to end, clean cut, in person. Done. 

The feeling doesn’t fade. And desperation makes you close your eyes and rub the ache that springs up between them with your thumb.

You aren’t sure if you want to, or should, sleep with him one last time. Would it hurt both of you more? Would he care? 

Would it hurt more if he just shrugged and got in his truck and that was it? 

You dig a carton of cigarettes out of your bag, futilely flicking a faulty lighter over the end, anxiety pressing further up your throat with every moment that passes without the flame appearing, that sweet first inhale of calming smoke in your lungs. 

It’s your first cigarette of the day, and you almost feel proud of yourself for abstaining. 

“Cherry?” 

The lighter clatters out of your hand as you jump and look up to find Joel mere feet away, keys in his hand. You hadn’t heard him approach and that makes your anxiety spike sharply, a response to walking to your car alone so many weekends after nights spent with strange men. The last hurtle, getting safely back to your car. 

“Joel,” you murmur, the anxiety spiraling in tight coils within you peaks and then eases off. The will to quit him, to tell him your arrangement needs to end, instantly dissipates, vanishes into thin air as though you’d never had the thought in the first place. It’s replaced instead by a comfort and calm that belies all sense. “Hi, sweetheart.” 

You hear the relief in your own voice, the purr it automatically drops down into, the curve of loosened, rounded vowels. 

The relief is replaced almost instantly by guilt, for not seeing him, for being happy to see him when you were the reason you hadn’t seen each other. 

His shoulders loosen and he continues forward, stooping to pick up your busted lighter with a grunt. “I got one,” he says, digging in his front jean pocket. 

He has the grace not to say anything about you smoking, not even something teasing, as he places the lighter in your hand and curls his fingers around yours. You jerk back for just a moment, the last vestige of your will to release him from the burden of you, before you melt into it. 

Not before you see the flash of hurt across his features. 

You’re finally able to light up, and Joel doesn’t release your hand.

Joel said he would quit, too, when you told him numbly in his truck after seeing his house, to make it easier, to not have cigarettes on offer for you anymore. 

It’s sweet and you wish you could hate him for it. He shouldn’t care, but he does. It shouldn’t matter to him, but it does. Or maybe he blames you for starting up the habit regularly again, and it’s a good enough excuse to stop. 

Apparently also still carrying a lighter around. For you? Or—

“Are you still smoking, Joel?” 

He clears his throat a little awkwardly, crossing his arms as he leans against the side of your car. “Harder than I remember it being the first time around. Quittin’.” He shakes his head and looks away from you, jaw tightening. “Made it easier to cope.” 

“Cope with what?” 

His gaze latches onto yours, and he waves a noncommittal hand. “Just,” he starts too loudly, a poor lie. “Nothin’. Nothin’.” 

You smile. “Okay, cowboy.”  

You inhale greedily and hold the smoke in your lungs until an ache convulses in your chest. 

The cloud of smoke lingers around you in the still air when you breathe out, before passing the cigarette to him. He takes a long drag, eyes not leaving yours. “You okay?” 

“Long day,” you murmur softly. “I’m all right.”

He grunts softly, and steps closer to you. “Long couple weeks. Longest I haven’t seen you, I’d reckon”

You can tear your hungry eyes away from him, the thickness of his arms across his chest, graying hair, the veins in his hands. The sky is a satin pink behind him, whisps of violet, bruised clouds still dissipating in the distance.

“End of the semester,” you shrug and smile, trying to remember that you’re supposed to be putting distance where there’s familiarity, quitting him like a bad habit, and not quite managing it. 

The itching memory of him is like something rough dancing over your skin. You want to pick it off, scratch it out—

You want to be stronger than you are, tell him things between you have run their course, but you can’t make yourself. You aren’t ready to release this feeling in your chest. Even if ending it would make things easier.

You don’t want to hurt him, then feel stupid for thinking you could. He threads your fingers together, keeps them knotted in a little nest against his chest. “Well, I’m glad you made it out now.” 

“Sorry—” The word pitches out of you, splatters on the ground in a messy heap. 

He shakes his head, watches you carefully as you shakily lift the cigarette to your mouth again and inhale. “I know you’re real busy.” He clears his throat a little awkwardly, like there’s something he wants to say or ask, but ultimately doesn’t. 

You step closer to him, into the circle of his arms, smoke curling in looping patterns around your head like cancerous halos. “I missed you,” you murmur, and that, at least, is true. He’s an ache in your bones, wire wrapped around your throat. 

But you feel soothed now, under a street lamp with him, smoke unfurling against a pink sky, tugging you closer. Something like peace settles in you.

“Mhm.” You pass the cigarette back and forth, until it’s down to the filter and drop it to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of your shoe. 

“Let me take care of you.” You murmur, gripping the front of his shirt in both your hands, an apology with your body on offer. You’ll do anything he wants. “Joel?” 

He reaches up and cups his hands around your wrists. His thumbs stoke slowly along the inside of your wrists. “You sure you’re okay?” 

“Mm.” 

He tilts your face toward his. 

It’s fine that you let him stoke your arm and lean his face close to yours. It means nothing, the way it always means nothing with men. Joel means nothing, his touch means nothing. If you wanted, you could step away and say things need to end. You know you could, but you don’t, you drift closer, the sea pulled by the moon. 

You could stop the tide, you think desperately, you could stop the march of time, the circle of the planets; you could lean down and hold your torch to the field and watch it all burn. 

But any remaining resolve to do so has fled. You’re too comfortable, too willing to sink against the warmth of his chest, the lull of his voice.

He clears his throat again and eyes flicking over your face before landing on your eyes. The hesitation only lasts a moment longer, before he comes out with it. “You wanna come out with me this evenin’ instead?” 

You blink, surprised, letting Joel draw you in closer, tighter, until your hips are flush against his. His hands anchor low on your hips, at the curve of your ass. “Oh Joel,” you coo, “you know I’ll go anywhere with you.” You look at him from beneath your lashes. An expression flashes across his face, so brief and esoteric, you wouldn’t even dare to hazard a guess at what it meant. Despite yourself, you brace. 

His hand flattens against your spine, travels up and down your back, until your muscles release. “So what’s your real answer?” 

You feel dizzy with the sudden twist, your thoughts forced elsewhere. 

A thread of anxiety wraps around your belly and squeezes tight, biting, like razor wire. Anger surfaces next. He’s not following your script, knows too much. The feeling of his tranquilizing hand circling your spine suddenly feels like sandpaper, gritty and rough, scraping you raw and naked.

“C’mon,” he teases, tapping your hip gently, his shoulders finally loosening, “it ain’t a hard question.” 

You suck in a breath to steady racing thoughts, the wonder and fear that mix in your gut that he knows just what to say and do to calm you, that he knows the steps of your dance well enough to avoid your feet. You try again for coquettish, trying to recapture the familiar playfulness. “Well, do you want me to fuck you here or there?”

But he evades your pull into your familiar pattern again, gives you nothing to orient yourself around, to his wants. When did you get so fucking obvious? You’re better than this, better than that at this. “I wanna know what it is you want to do.” 

It gives nothing away, about what he wants you to say. You don’t know the right answer, the next step, and you’re left floundering. “Where would we go?” You ask eventually.

“It’s a surprise.” 

For a moment, you consider slipping your hand between your bodies and grabbing him through his jeans, whisper I want you to fuck me, seductive and just a tad whiney. 

It would make things simpler. It would make quitting him easier, when you got around to it. 

But his hand is soft on your cheek, like caressing, protective armour, and you’re tired. 

You desperately want to close your eyes and let him lead you toward a surprise, toward something you get the sense he’s sunk a lot of thought into. 

“Surprise me, then,” you say softly, the words barely audible, voice stolen from the cave of your mouth. “Joel.” 

“Cherry,” he answers, just as gentle. “Good girl. Knew you’d make the right choice.” 

Oh. 

How are you ever going to give him, give this, up? 

His hand is a familiar warmth on your spine. The longest dance you’ve spun through with him, leading you across the parking lot, offering a hand up into the cab. 

Joel braces an arm against the top of the still open doorway and looks at you for a long moment. “What?” 

“Nothin’.” He shakes his head, then nods once and looks down, his other hand anchored on his hip. “Glad you’re here, is all.” 

“You just want to see my tits.” 

“Wouldn’t mind it,” he answers, grinning suddenly back. “But I mean it. Don’t know what to do with myself without you on the weekend.” 

“There’re other girls, Joel. Can recommend a few.” 

He shakes his head slowly. “No there ain’t.” 

.

.

.

He drives with one hand on your thigh and the windows down, and catches you up on what he hadn’t been able to relay in your short, infrequent phone calls over the last few weeks. 

You forget why you need to quit him, release him back into the sea, watch the silver flash of scales disappear beneath a wave, an addict surrounded by your fix. But then he’ll mention the ranch, and all those photos, all the things you’d agonized over, will flash through your mind. 

You wonder if you’re being fair, or rational. If maybe you’re pushing him away because you aren’t really sure what it means to be close to someone, like this or otherwise. 

Given the chance, maybe he would tell you more about his life in time. It’s a rough thing to bring up unannounced to anyone, let alone someone like you. Your stomach twists into thick knots, the threads of all the things unspoken between you wrapping around your throat like a vise. 

Maybe the short of it is that you aren’t worth telling, that maybe you aren’t worth much at all, despite the way he makes you feel. 

But some part of you wants to believe it’s all still possible, that you could confess your lie and Joel would understand why you’d done it, that he hadn’t meant anything to you yet, like you hadn’t meant anything to him yet. That he would see past that number, past the guilt and shame, to the connection you share, and tell you it’s okay, it doesn’t matter much, not between the two of you. 

Humiliation and fear and self-hatred follows the bubbly pink hopefulness. Only someone delusional would have hope for something like that. To wish to sit in a confessional with your lover and still not be enough. 

Because it wouldn't be, even if Joel was okay about the age difference, the lie, and the things he hadn’t told you were because it was too painful to speak about and not because you didn’t belong in his life and he doesn’t want you there. Even if all of that were true, you are too indebted to him for it to matter. 

You live off of his money. Entering into a real relationship. . .you wouldn’t be able to survive, and to have him finance your life entirely, receive nothing in return, not even the myth of your body, is unthinkable. Confessing means giving up more than you’re willing to admit, it means not being able to afford your apartment, it means giving up on school, the thing you’d done so many horrible things for.

The most rational part of you knows none of it matters. No man wanted to enter into a dependent relationship with a used up whore. 

You’ll never know if you don’t just say it, but you’re terrified. 

It’s easier to just break things off, and never find out where you stand. The thought of going back to the club, fucking men that aren’t Joel, to learn again and again what they want, who you’re supposed to be for them, makes your throat close. 

“Baby? You hear me?” His voice filters in from a long distance, then surfaces all at once. The wind is soft and sweet against your skin. The truck smells like desert air, laden with the scent of  red dust, sagebrush, and lavender, mixed with softened leather and the smell of Joel’s skin, sun warmed bergamot.

“No,” you murmur. “Sorry, sweetheart. Say it for me again.” 

He shakes his head and squeezes your thigh. “Just askin’ how your exams went.” 

“Okay, I think,” you hazard. “I’ll know more after the holidays.” 

“Sure you aced it,” he says, voice soothing and gentle. “My smart girl.” 

Butterflies flutter in your chest, prideful. He’s pretty washed in the last orange rays of the sunset, shadows playing across his veiny hands, his wide spread thighs. “If you want me to suck your dick you can just ask.” 

He shakes his head, rolls his eyes. “Jesus.” 

“Say it again.” 

“What?” His voice is light, teasing.

“You know what.” 

“Maybe I want you to hear you ask it.” His fingers trace up and down your thigh, leaving imprints of warmth on your skin, the air cool in the wake of it. “Like it when you need somethin’ from me.” 

You tilt your head, watching him, the strong line of his jaw, the cast of his eyes over the road. His hair is longer than when you first met him, curling behind his ears. “You know I like you even when I don’t need something?” 

“That so?” 

“Mm.” You reach over to stoke the backs of your fingers over his beard. “Please say it again.” 

“Well, how could I say no to that? My girl,” he says, and you like that even better. “My smart girl. I know you aced it.” 

Something self satisfied curls around your ribs and licks down your spine. Instead of answering you unbuckle your seatbelt and push yourself across the bench seat, rebuckling the middle belt across your lap, just to be closer to him. 

You lean your head on his shoulder and feel his body relax, sinking back into the worn leather. “Tell me where you’re taking me.” 

“We’re almost there,” he answers by not answering you. “We got a little time though. You hungry?” 

“No.” 

“You wouldn’t say it if you were.” 

“That’s not true.” 

“We don’t have to have sex.” 

Guilt, shame, teasing threads of humiliation and treacherous hope, that he knows you don’t like to have sex when you’ve eaten, that this is the second time since you’ve known him that he’s reassured you your hunger came first.

“Joel—”

“Or you can just lie there for once and I’ll do all the work.” 

“Not sure your knees could stand that.” 

“Funny.” 

You giggle and wave a hand before you, swatting away errant self ridicule. “For the record, you do do most of the work. But if I knew where we were going I could tell you for sure if we should stop for something to eat. Does this activity have snacks?” 

“It does.” 

“Then I’m really good.” 

He seems satisfied with that as the sun disappears and darkness settles around you, like the spill of ink across the velvety folds of midnight blue on the horizon. The rest of the drive is quiet, the steady drip of old country songs from the radio, crooning on about love more often than not. 

The land beyond the windshield is rubbed in charcoal, acres of empty land broken only by cacti and yellowing scrubbrush. A crescent moon rises on the horizon, a bedrock of stars. You’re just starting to drift off when the truck slows and turns off the highway, onto a dirt road that winds on until a neon sign appears.

 “A drive-in?” You murmur sleepily. 

His cheek brushes your forehead, you want to believe he’s kissing you. “Ever been to one?” 

“When I was really little, I think.” 

“Used to come here with Tommy when I was a teenager,” he says as he brings the truck to a gentle stop behind the trail of red tail lights leading into the distance. “On weekends usually.” 

“To make out with girls in the backseat of a car?” 

He chuckles, the line inches forward. “More Tommy than me.” 

Yet he was the one who accidentally got someone pregnant at nineteen. A mistake you know he wouldn’t change for anything, but that had altered the path of his life. He had also been a teenage boy that had taken responsibility for things, that ended up the primary and then only care for that child. It’s rare, so rare, and you don’t think he realizes it. 

He thinks nothing of it. 

You wonder what he was like as a kid, a teenager. If you would have met him then, at the same age, would you have liked each other? Would he have made out with you in the back of some car?

But in this reality, when he was nineteen, you weren’t yet born, and wouldn’t be for several years. You age gap spans lifetimes, and he would have been like to met your mother then. 

“I’m sure you broke your share of hearts,” you tease, not lifting your head from his shoulder. “What movie are they playing?” 

He clears his throat, shifting in his seat. “A double feature. Couple old westerns.” 

“Must be real old then,” you say without thinking.

 But Joel just laughs. “Watch it,” he says softly. “I did watch ‘em when I was a kid though, and they were old then, so I doubt you’ll be overly familiar.” 

“So you just needed some company to watch a movie.” 

“Ain’t that what you are?” 

He means it as a joke, you can hear it in his voice, but it sinks a heavy weight in your chest. You sit up straight, leaning away from his shoulder. 

“Did think you might like it though,” he muses, unaware of the turmoil rolling around inside you like a loose marble, knocking into every live wire nerve inside your body, scratching a hand over his beard, nodding to himself. “Lots of horses in ‘em.” 

The whirring, anxious part of your mind settles again and you snort. “Don’t make it weird.” 

It’s finally your turn at the ticket booth, Joel forking over twenty dollars for the two of you in exchange for a pair of speakers and a cragged, ripped ticket with the number twenty-two stamped into it. 

The number makes your stomach give a vinegary, sour squirm. It feels like an omen, a reminder from a force bigger than yourself. 

“What’s the number, darlin’?” Joel asks as he navigates the rows of cars. 

You crumple the paper in your fist and smile. “Twenty-two.” If the expression on your face betrays the tightness squeezing around your ribcage, roping around your heart it feels like it might pop, Joel doesn’t say anything. 

He backs into your allotted space, and pops open his door. 

You’re still gathering up the speakers when he opens your door. “Joel?” He cups his palm against your elbow. “Maybe it would be better to park the other way?” You ask, worried about sitting on the tailgate for so long, unforgiving metal against the backs of your thighs and legs in a skirt, even if it is longer. 

But the worry is unfounded, because he reaches into the tiny backseat of the cab and retracts several blankets. 

“Oh.” 

“Uh-huh,” he taps your thigh, gently nudging you out of his way. “You think I’d let you sit like that?” 

“Listen, baby,” you begin, a complaint on your tongue. “The amount of men who would let me bruise my tailbone on their tailgate is astounding.” 

“Don’t doubt it, Cherry” he says, lowering the gate. “I ain’t them. Tailbone is safe with me.” 

You rub a hand up his spine, lean in close so your mouth brushes his ear. “I know. The whole area, shall we say, is safe with you.” 

“Just sit down,” he grumbles. “Accussin’ me of makin’ out with girls here. How you think I accomplished that?” 

“So you did,” you poke him in the side. He grunts and it sounds half like a laugh. “Heartbreaker,” you accuse. “And a gentleman. Rare. Very rare.” 

“Uh-huh,” he grouses, pushing a folder blanket into your hands, “Why don’t you just go on and fix that how you want it, honey?” 

Chuckling, you perch at the end of the truckbed and help him unfold a couple of thick blankets, shifting to your knees to fix the edges. His hand lands briefly on the back of your thigh, sliding up and down before he retracts his touch. “All good?” You ask. 

“Mm. What do you want to eat?” 

You lie back, legs dangling off the end of the truckbed. Joel’s hand curls around the back of your knee in the dark, thumb stroking the soft skin there. It’s automatic, natural, the way he slots between your legs. 

“Popcorn, of course.” 

“‘Course. Anything else?” 

“Can we eat somewhere else later?” 

He looks surprised but only for a moment. “Yep. Anywhere y’want.” 

You nod and sit up, sliding your fingers up his forearm, before moving to the back of the truck and adjusting yourself amid the pillows and blankets. He chuckles. “Guess I’ll go get it myself then.” 

“D’want me to come?” You ask, resting your cheek on the cool metal side of the truck. “I can come with you.” 

He shakes his head, strokes your cheek gently when he moves to the side of the truck. “Anything else, princess?” 

“Don’t call me that, cowboy.” 

“Well?” 

“Coke,” you cup your hand against his, press it more firmly into your cheek. “Cherry coke.” 

He rolls his eyes, crinkling pleasantly at the corners. Your belly tightens. “Woulda been worried if you didn’t want cherry.” 

His hand slides away from your face and you watch him walk away, toward the glowing neon of the concession stand that you can just make out in the distance. The lot is all trampled, dusty dirt, shouting children and chattering adults, a looming blank white screen in the distance. The blanket is soft against your skin. The cooling air still holds the day’s heat in greedy fingers, but you feel lazily content. 

Curdling, curling, vulture-like anxiety of the last few days, a faded afterthought. Worry seems very far away as you turn your face up and watch the stars wheel overhead, like holes in the night sky, like criss-crossed, pinioned wings of something ancient.

Joel returns just as sleep begins to embed itself in your veins, the looping angularity of his scent billowing up from the blankets like a softly sung lullaby. 

“Cher?” The bed of the truck sinks with his added weight. The backs of his fingers brush your cheek as he settles in, leaning back against the stacked pillows. 

“Joel. Are we going to make out?” 

“Sure, if you want.” 

You grumble and take the fountain drink he offers you as you sit up. “Don’t sound too enthusiastic about it.”

He shakes his head, mouth twitching. “Hold on, honey,” he says, layering his hand over yours. Condensation from the cup cool on your wrist, beading down your arm. “They didn’t have cherry—”

“Regular is okay.” 

“Well, it ain’t that either. They had cherry syrup, had ‘em put some of that in.” 

“You didn’t have to do that.” 

“Well, it might taste like shit so don’t get impressed yet.” 

You take a sip, raising a brow at him. 

The first gulp is all syrup which makes you cough and Joel laugh, but when you mix it, it’s pretty good. “If I said I hated it?” 

“Guess I’d go back.” 

It’s too familiar, too gentle, the way he wraps his arm around your shoulders and settles back with you. The flickering white light of the screen playing across his features, blinking down from ten. You curl into his chest with your drink and resign yourself to this not being the day you quit.

It’s so easy to fall into the familiar grooves of your relationship, just like the weekend you had ridden horses, you begin to forget, to dream again of a life where you aren’t his sugarbaby, one in which your age doesn’t matter. To dream of a world where you open your mouth and tell him the truth and everything works out. 

The movie is entertaining in a gimmicky kind of way, shootouts and ragdolling bodies and weeping widows and towns that need saving by a lone man with a gun and a horse, full of desert vistas and stilted dialogue.

“He looks like you,” you tell Joel of the main character, gruff and grumbly. 

“I do not,” he says, stoking the skin of your hip where your shirt had ridden up. 

“Joel, he’s your spitting image. He even plays the guitar like you,” you point at the screen as the cowboy in question finishes cleaning his gun to put a guitar over his lap and begin strumming it, the red flicker of the onscreen camp fire illuminating the plains of his face, a dog at his feet. 

“Maybe I was lyin’ about that,” he says, sarcasm thick in his graveled voice. 

“And here I was hoping you might sing to me one day.” 

He’s quiet for a while after that, fingers stroking your spine, pulling a spare blanket over your shoulders when you shiver once, just slightly. His chest is warm; the steady thud of his heart, the heady, thick scent of his skin. 

A brief window of anxiousness flares within you when you feel too settled, brushing salt and grease from the hot, buttery popcorn on your fingertips against a napkin. You think to offer to jerk him off under the blanket but ultimately let the nervous thought fade away. He clearly wants this, as it is, for whatever reason. 

There’s an intermission between movies, the corny soundtrack playing as people get up to stretch. 

You’re plucking cherries out from amid the ice in your cup, left over from the syrup, tying knots in the stems and handing them over to Joel who lines them up like prizes on the edge of the truck. 

“Want some more?”

“If you please, baby.” 

He takes your cup with him, and you wolf whistle as he walks away. It draws a few looks, and maybe that’s why a few minutes later, Tommy Miller and a woman you vaguely recognize from photos are standing at the edge of the truck while you adjust your top even though you're decent and covered and not even wearing your old club clothes. 

Tommy’s smile is easy, his hand against the woman’s back. “Howdy, I think this is my brother’s truck. You know him?” 

“Joel,” you blurt. “Yeah, yes.”

He waits, clearly waiting for you to offer who you are and why you’re there. 

You have never had to confront someone’s family members, mainly because you fucked them once and never saw them again but you’ve known Joel for close to a year now, and his brother is standing in front of you with a woman close to his age that must be his wife, and he doesn’t know who you are or what your name is or that you’re his brother’s whore. 

“I, um—” 

The smile starts to slide off of Tommy’s face at your lack of explanation. Your throat feels dry and you don’t know what to say. What can you say? That will satisfy them enough that they’ll walk away and that also won’t cause problems for Joel? What’s a good enough excuse that he would have a twenty-something in his truck? 

Thankfully you’re saved from answering by the sudden return of Joel, carrying your drink. “Tommy.” 

“Hey, big brother.” Tommy’s face lifts back into a bright smile.

You feel suddenly very young and out of place, like a child sitting at the adult’s only table, curled on your knees while the rest of them stand in a half circle, unreachable. For one horrible moment, it seems like Joel won’t introduce you, that you’ll sit there, so close and far away at the same time. 

A physical, stark reminder that you don’t belong, even if you and Joel might be deluded enough to believe it, no one else ever would. It’s even worse than the photos you’d seen. An adrift, lonely feeling snags around your heart, webs over the already festering, breaking wounds, desperately tries to hold the splintering fragile pieces of you together. A drifting disconnection pressing in at you, the way it hasn’t in so long. 

The  air is wobbly and creased with wavering, pale light. You feel far away from yourself, disconnected from your body, which used to happen all the time but doesn’t anymore. Not since Joel, not since you haven’t had to sleep with random men each weekend that might do anything to you. 

Your chest hurts, and it’s a little hard to breathe. 

A whine in your ears makes it impossible to hear them. 

“—my brother, Tommy. His wife, Maria.” The sound of Joel’s voice is submerged in water, lost beneath icy waves, but it draws you closer to the surface, and you can almost see the sun beyond the crushing roll of the surf. “Tommy, Maria, this is Cherry.” 

“Hi,” you say, voice steady, bubbly, despite the dizzying rush of full bodied sound pulsing through your skull all at once, the static noise of the projector pulsating a grainy grayish-white behind them, the staccato sound of overlapping voices. “Nice to meet you.” You almost say you’ve heard a lot about him but you aren’t sure how much you’re supposed to know, so you shut your mouth and smile, pleasant, relaxed. 

You shake their hands in turn.

“What are you two up to out here?” 

“You’re actually crashing my date, little brother.” 

You think it’s funny how they call each other that, little brother, big brother, very much trying not to focus on the other part of his sentence, buoyed by it. But what else should he say?

Hey Tommy, this is my prostitute? 

Sure. 

“Date, huh? Someone finally loosened my brother up enough for that?” Tommy is looking at you closely, his hand still around yours. He loosens his grip and lets your hand fall. “Well maybe we’ll see you at the next family get together.” 

Not a chance in hell. 

“Well I am a party kind of girl.” 

“We’ll leave you to it.” 

Joel and Tommy say their goodbyes, Maria eyeing you with a gaze that says she knows, or at least suspects, and doesn’t approve. Her stare is icy when it lands on Joel. Confusion pounds behind your eyes, that her ire is directed at her brother-in-law and not at you. 

After they walk away, Joel hands you the new cherry coke and doesn’t comment on what just happened. “They know, Joel,” you say softly, just in case he’s in denial. “Maria definitely does.” 

He nods. “Yep, and she ain’t exactly happy about it.” 

He doesn’t seem concerned as he sits next to you again, shoulder pressing into yours in a vaguely comforting way. 

“Arent you worried they’ll think you’re a dirty old man?” 

It’s the worst possible joke, at the worst possible moment. The flat delivery of your voice doesn’t help, but you still feel shaken. 

He laughs, “Maybe I’m embracin’ it.” 

Where the encounter has planted a knot of worry deep inside you, writhing and alive, it’s seemed to have calmed Joel. He takes a sip of his own drink and seems buoyed. You can’t parse it, peering up at him from where he tucked his arm around your shoulders, the way his mouth twitches. 

“Relax,” he says gently. “You’re all right, baby. It ain’t nothin’ to worry about.” 

The screen flickers, and another title screen appears. 

You feel all right, strangely, in the cradle of his arms, with his careful reassurance in your ear. And however contrived it might be, to get you through the next movie in peace, you don’t care. You let the worry ease out of you. 

If Joel was really okay with his family seeing him out with you, seemed unconcerned by it, then you shouldn’t worry about it either.

But a nugget of unease lingers, wedged between your ribs. Maria’s livid gaze. She would say something to her husband, who might just have something to say to Joel about it. 

It doesn’t stop you from falling asleep on his chest, listening to the even, relaxed sweep of his breath through his lungs. 

. 

.

.

When you wake, it’s eerily quiet. 

The hum of conversation and the scratchy play of the old movie is gone, replaced with the empty sound of wind flowing across desert, the rustle of scrubby grass and chitter of small creatures. The night sky is a fathomless, deep black, the stars a bright streak through the middle. 

Joel’s arms are tight around you, breath slow and even against the back of your neck. He’s sleeping. In the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with only a crescent moon, perched thin and curious in the corner of the sky. 

There’s something untouchable, and far away about sleeping beneath the sky. It makes you feel small and insignificant, but in a pacifying way. You’ve made mistakes, inadvertently and of your own choices, but what did any of it matter in the grand scheme of the universe, the stars chasing themselves around the heavens. 

“Joel?” You mumble, rubbing his forearm curled over your belly. “I think we’re alone.” 

“Mm, you were sleepin’,” he mumbles, arm tightening across your spine when you turn in his arms to face him. “Looked like you ain’t been.” 

Oh. 

Maybe he’s saying you look like shit. But you think you know Joel well enough now to know that isn’t what he means. It means you look exhausted, it means he wants to help you not feel that way

You feel a little disgruntled. All your best laid plans are up in smoke, a curlicue of a god’s ringing laughter. You were meant to break things off with him, instead he tricked you into resting. If he’d woken you up, you would have gone through the familiar dance of soliciting him, offering your body to him, feeling guilty that you hadn’t already, not really. 

Maybe you should try not to, but you feel removed from your life and his, the encounter with his family, the stress and acrid, bubbling anxiety of the last few weeks seems distant and unimportant. There’s only you and him, suspended in amber on the surface of some remote and distant planet. 

“So we’re trespassing so that I can sleep?” 

He chuckles. “I know the guy who owns this place. He don’t mind.” 

“What if a murderer is out here?” You stage whisper, tucking your nose against his collarbone, breathing him in deeply. If you concentrate hard enough, you swear you can smell hay beneath his usual leather and bergamot and salt. 

You kiss his throat, feel the hitch in his voice when he answers you, “Ain’t likely.” 

He tastes like salt, too. 

You kiss the underside of his jaw, trace your tongue over the bristles of his beard. It kind of tickles, kind of stings. His hand slips beneath your shirt, flattens it against the ridge of your spine, thick fingers wrapping around the cage of your ribs. “Guess I just have to trust you on that.” 

“Mm, wouldn’t let nothin’ happen to you.” 

A hot well of emotion opens in the back of your throat, rises to the tip of your tongue. You bite it back, softly spoken words, caresses that would eventually turn to burning slaps. 

You kiss him instead, opening your mouth against his to slip your tongue past his lips. You press a hand inside his shirt, skin achingly hot, roving over the dips in his back, muscle in his shoulders, the curl of dark chest hair against your fingertips. 

Joel tastes like popcorn, but mostly like cherries from your drink, the dark bubble of soda. He feels like a warm Saturday spent in the sun, a backyard barbecue, the tuck of a blanket around sleeping shoulders.

He groans against your mouth when you roll your hips against his, and pulls your knee over his hip. But nothing else follows, the burning arousal that usually follows simmers low and patient within you. 

And for a long while, you just. . .kiss. Makeout like teenagers and although you’re much closer to your teenage years than Joel, you can imagine him there years ago, making some poor girl fall in love with him, kissing her in the dark during the slower parts of some long forgotten thriller. 

You never had that experience, either in a movie theater or a drive-in but you’re doing it now, with Joel, sucking lightly on his tongue, letting him touch your tits and pinch your nipples until you moan into his mouth. You feel breathless and much younger and much less experienced than you are. You feel unsteady, like a newborn foal on shaky legs. 

His hand slides over your ribs and back as he shifts the other to cradle your face in his palm, rubbing his thumb against your lips when he pulls away. You suck it into your mouth just to watch his eyes go dark, just so he’ll rub the spit against your lips. 

“Miss the lipstick.” 

“I’ll wear it for you sometime.” 

“Good.” 

He kisses you again, tongue exploring your mouth like it's the first time he’s done so, hand laid carefully over your throat without pressure.

You break away with a choke when your pussy flutters, swallows around nothing. He moves his hand between your legs instead, rubs you slowly through your underwear.                       

“You make me want to believe,” you murmur. The words are pulled from the depths of your lungs, gasping and truthful in a terrible, consuming way. You don’t mean to say it and can’t find the words to take it back, sweaty and needy and warm beneath the blanket with him. 

You kiss the pad of his thumb and don’t look at him, examining the fold of his collarbone against his t-shirt instead. 

He frowns, blinks down at you. “Believe what?” 

You shake your head and keep stroking his cheek and neck, feeling the ghost of his breath against your lips. “Just that. That you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” 

“You don’t believe me?” 

“I’m just used to no one caring.” His chest expands, you feel the intake on your palm when you press it there, veins of breath and remorse and a pulsing, hollow ache. “But you do. Even when it’s something silly.” 

Maybe it’s the dark, the tumbling vastness of the universe overhead, the feeling of his heart beating wet and bloody in your hand, but you continue. “I was so naive. The first time. I thought because I’d had sex before that I could do it no problem. It couldn’t be hard to just. . .fuck someone.” 

Joel cups your cunt and then shifts his touch to your back. “Yeah,” he says, encouraging. “Go on, darlin’.” 

You swallow, tighten your fingers in his shirt. “But then I was there. Getting stares, men wondering. I could tell they were wondering if I was what they were hoping I was. But I was so shiny and new.” 

Joel, to his credit, doesn’t try to interrupt you, tell you it’s in the past. He listens, and you can feel the thin pulse of anger on your behalf, tying a tight bow around his chest. His palm keeps stroking your spine. 

You weren’t meant to give anything else up, not after seeing all those pictures on the walls, all the things in his own history he never trusted you with, but you can’t stop yourself. You were supposed to break it off, today. 

Instead, you’re curled in his arms, whispering your sorrows and truths into his chest, sticking your memories between his ribs, to take root or to wither and die, remains to be seen.

He sees you, that you can’t deny. There’s nothing false in this moment. 

“And I was so scared. I didn’t think I’d be scared, and the only thing I kept thinking was that I was becoming a statistic. One I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life.” You burrow closer to him, whisper the next part against his shoulder. “I was about to leave. I couldn’t do it. I’d just have to accept the life I was supposed to have and stop fighting it.” 

There’s a light squeeze at your hip, the stroke of a trusted hand down your thigh to your knee and back again, devoid of lust for anything more. 

You close your eyes and rest your chin on his shoulder. “It was nothing, compared to other stuff that would happen, but the first time is always the worst, I think. He was nice to me, helped me relax, made me feel special, but I think he just wanted to ruin something new and fairly innocent.” 

You don’t tell Joel the awful details of it, that he doesn’t need to know. “I had to pull over on the way home and throw up and my knees got all bloody and scratched, but in a way I was grateful. He threw me into the deep end and I had to swim or sink. I swam, my dream wasn’t dead yet. I went back the next night and he fucked me again. He was. . .nicer I guess, the second time.” 

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, seeming truly upset. “Cherry—”

“And then you came along,” you barrel on. “And I’ve forgotten every single lesson, because I didn’t have to learn any lessons with you. So I’m stupid and I believe. I believe you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” 

He tilts your head up in careful hands. “You know you ain’t deserve any of this right?” You don’t answer and he tucks you into his chest again. “My girl,” he murmurs. “I wish I’d met you sooner.”

“Me too.” You grip him hard and feel yourself detaching, floating away from the memories that threaten to bubble to the surface with the retelling of the first time. You need help grounding yourself to this moment, to him, present and attentive beside you. “Can we have sex?” 

“You sure, darlin’?” 

You nod, already working on the button of his jeans. “Yeah. I need to. . .I want to feel close to you.” 

Joel grunts when your fingers curl around him. He’s warm and velvet in your hand, and you want to suck his cock but you want him to fuck you more. You stroke him slowly, thumbing at the slit until he groans, jeans pushed down around his knees. 

He bunches your skirt around your hips and tugs your panties to the side, sheathing himself inside you, the fit snug, a pleasantly achy stretch after weeks away from each other.

“How do you want me, baby?” Hand kneading the meat of your hip, the lascivious curve of our waist. 

“Just like this,” you pant, moving your body in time with him, a delicate push and pull.

“Okay,” he shushes you, “All right. Good girl. I’m always glad when you tell me what you want.” 

You shiver and arch into him.

It’s slow, a careful, mindful building, push and pull. Heat pulses between you, waves of pleasure that crest and crash in a matter of minutes or hours or years.

Maybe you’ve been out in the Texas night, unfurling, unraveling, each other for decades. 

He comes inside you as your pussy convulses around him, words pressed to your skin that hurt. He’s got you, you’re okay now. 

For now, maybe, you think when he presses your legs over his shoulders, spreads your pussy and folds pleasure into you one well placed movement of his tongue at a time. 

But his brother knows.

And even if you aren’t the one to pop the bubble, outside forces are at work now, and the barrier between your hidden weekends and the outside world has always been thin. 

It is bound to burst.

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

best laid plans

pairing: joel miller x f!sex worker!reader

wc: 9.2k

summary: You attempting quitting with variable results.

cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (20s/50s), smut [piv, choking, mentions of fantasized rough sex though none depicted], dissociation, mentions/descriptions of past sex work, hope, anxiety and spiraling thoughts, unhealthy coping methods, language regarding addiction, angst, sugaring, reader is a sex worker, smoking, internalized shame, self deprecation, guilt, emotional vulnerability, poverty

a/n: this was one of those chapters that I had such a clear image of in my mind but turned out the way I wanted it to, so its not a favorite of min. true pain begins next week so enjoy what little hope we have now! as always would love to know what you think! thank you for reading!

Quitting is harder than you think. 

Restless anxiety pulses beneath your skin, stretches the boundaries of your concentration. You long for the filmy hazy of blue smoke in the air, the pacifying caress of nicotine beneath your skin. 

The irritation and distraction and sleep deprivation alone make quitting cold turkey an impossibility. You need to be polite and calm and professional at your assistantship; you need to be able to concentrate to study for your impending exams. 

Smoking, aside from the nicotine addiction, is comforting to you. It reminds you of the softer parts of your childhood, your mother’s crooning singing voice, your father’s graveled voice tucking you into bed, the scent of menthols on his shirt when you tucked your face into his chest, the sound of a lighter flicking, the strike of a match outside your bedroom window, your parents talking among the sounds of night as you fell asleep in the summer heat, still sticky from sweat and popsicle residue. 

It comforts you to hold a cigarette between your fingers. It’s a crutch when there’s a lull in conversation, or a prop to start one. You’ve been smoking since you were sixteen, and quitting is easier said than done. It wastes your very limited money; it embraces you in other, more terrible, memories, acrid as tar, poisonous as a snake around your throat, and good ones, the comforting first note of a lullaby.

The smell often gives you a headache but you love it all the same, love the curls of smoke drifting through the air, bleeding through windows and porch screens.

But you don’t want to smell like your mother, don’t want to be reminded of your past each time you light up. You don’t want to wake up and feel like you’re standing exactly where you always have been, just outside your childhood home, waiting for things to be different than they are, for your circumstances to be different than they are, for you to be different than you are. 

When you left Joel the weekend you rode horses, he’d kissed you goodbye like he always does on Sunday afternoons. Your mind had been a turbulent sea of emotional pain that you’d only just managed to keep corralled inside yourself for the remainder of the weekend. 

The crushing, bruising humiliation of finding out just how little he cared to share his real life had found you frantic, chain smoking, tears clogging your throat by the time you got back to your apartment.

You had felt stupid, too, because what should you expect from him? Just because he’d told you about the grief he suffered of his wife, did not mean he wanted some whore with the keys to the grief that so clearly defined him. 

Determination was a necessary lead weight in your chest, chasing away the tears that rimmed your eyes in red, beating away the fragile, immature feelings of failure and shame and a desperation to be loved, to be enough, just fucking once. 

Determination to change something, to follow through on quitting something just to prove to yourself that you could, had overwhelmed you, dried the tears. 

You’re stronger than the desire inside you, the furious, feeble need to be seen and loved.

Joel does not love you, but you feel loved by him, and maybe that’s worse, more devastating, to feel something so obviously and blatantly a lie told by your own mind. It’s nothing short of pathetic. 

You’re not in a movie; good men don’t fall in love with prostitutes. 

Little changes are important in breaking habits, a hasty, frenetic google search had told you that evening. 

So, you’d deep cleaned your apartment that Sunday evening and late into the night, working yourself to the bone, hell bent on not thinking about why you were doing it. Thrown open the windows, scrubbed the yellow nicotine residue from the walls and floors, washed the smell from your curtains and clothes and couch, cycle after cycle of laundry, until your hands were cracked and bleeding and the only thing you could smell was bleach.

You stopped smoking inside—in your apartment, your car. You began to count campus generally as ‘inside’ and stopped smoking there entirely, too. It made the act less convenient, less desirable. You slap a nicotine patch on through the day, do breathing exercises when you feel irritated, and chew gum when you get the itch to smoke. 

It kind of works.

.

.

.

You still smoke in the evenings, though in the parking lot of your apartment building, next to weed choked gravel and dripping, rusted husks of the ancient AC units stuck in first floor windows. 

The same logic can be applied to Joel, you reason, two days later, when the panic finally begins to fade. 

You need to wean yourself away from him, away from the addicting pulse of his attention and affection. 

You have to break the habit of relying on him. 

The next weekend, you cancel on Joel, then reject the money he sends you via a payment app and then his call, too. Busy, you text, with the end of the semester. You send him a fairly tasteless nude later, though, and feel ill and used, even if it was your own doing. A reminder to both of you, that’s what you offer him, your body and sex, but nothing else, ignoring the fact that you can dip into the savings you have, that you have a savings, because of his support. 

No gifts, no dates, no rent money, you tell yourself while avoiding him at every turn. Cash for sex, passionless and demeaning like it should be. 

No careful caress of his hand around your throat, no more giving up something soft, the fragile bones of a bird’s wing, like memories and your anal virginity and saying something stupid in the blissful afterglow.

You stick your hand in your underwear one evening and think of him fucking your mouth, hurting you, holding you hard and rough, coming on your face. You make yourself see him the way all the others treated you, make yourself want it, wish for it, so that the feelings will fade. You come and then cry, guiltily aware that you’re torturing yourself with a version of a man that he’s not, will never be, that you’re losing it.

Maybe some of the instability crashing through you like a bull through a china shop is from the stress of your qualifying exams, the nights you don’t sleep because you’re studying so long and late that you feel lightheaded and dizzy and like you can’t eat, which only makes it all worse. This is what the last two years have been for, every nasty comment, every slap, every twenty dollar bill wadded up and shoved in your bra with a laugh, you can’t lose it now, fail now. 

If you can wipe smoking from your life like a thumb through marker, you can scrub him from it too. If you can sell yourself to make it through school, you can quit him. You’ve done worse, been stronger. 

But, like smoking, you can’t quit him all at once. 

It’s the cardinal sin of a sex worker, getting attached, feeling something for a client that is more likely to hurt you than help you. 

Maybe you can just stop seeing him, disappear back into the underbelly of the club, traipse back through the yawning, soul-sucking maw of that black front door, fuck whoever was there and willing to pay. 

A terrible image comes to your mind, of you ghosting Joel entirely, him coming to find you because he’s worried. His silhouette against the wall of the club, red and pulsing and angry, as you get on your knees for someone else.  

But you can’t, and you deserve the pain in your chest, the raw aching in your hands and knees, for not being able to just let him go. 

.

.

.

The hotel is wreathed in holiday lights when you pull into the parking lot, fat green and red bulbs arcing in great swoops over the cars, the ever trickling fountain, threaded between the drooping branches of the orange trees heavy with fruit, twisted around the front columns in a vaguely gaudy way. The pavement is still wet beneath your shoes when you step out of your car from a rare, brief rain that had sprinkled down on the drive over. 

The lights remind you of the lights your father used to string around the porch, and feel out of place wrapped around the expensive exterior of the hotel, among the heavy smell of citrus and petrichor and oil carried on the breeze. 

The engine pops as it cools, and your hands shake with nerves. There’s an open, festering wound in your chest, a hole left open and weeping. Saw toothed and hungry, affection starved, a starving, crying, desperate wolf. 

You turn to examine yourself in the window’s reflection, cupping your tits, wishing they sat a little higher naturally, wondering why it mattered. 

It’s only been a couple weeks. 

You’ve only missed two weekends with him, with a handful of mostly carefully avoided phone calls between, but it feels life months, years. Your skin is desperate, hungry for his touch, his hands on your body, handling you in ways no one else ever has. 

Something you hope to end, clean cut, in person. Done. 

The feeling doesn’t fade. And desperation makes you close your eyes and rub the ache that springs up between them with your thumb.

You aren’t sure if you want to, or should, sleep with him one last time. Would it hurt both of you more? Would he care? 

Would it hurt more if he just shrugged and got in his truck and that was it? 

You dig a carton of cigarettes out of your bag, futilely flicking a faulty lighter over the end, anxiety pressing further up your throat with every moment that passes without the flame appearing, that sweet first inhale of calming smoke in your lungs. 

It’s your first cigarette of the day, and you almost feel proud of yourself for abstaining. 

“Cherry?” 

The lighter clatters out of your hand as you jump and look up to find Joel mere feet away, keys in his hand. You hadn’t heard him approach and that makes your anxiety spike sharply, a response to walking to your car alone so many weekends after nights spent with strange men. The last hurtle, getting safely back to your car. 

“Joel,” you murmur, the anxiety spiraling in tight coils within you peaks and then eases off. The will to quit him, to tell him your arrangement needs to end, instantly dissipates, vanishes into thin air as though you’d never had the thought in the first place. It’s replaced instead by a comfort and calm that belies all sense. “Hi, sweetheart.” 

You hear the relief in your own voice, the purr it automatically drops down into, the curve of loosened, rounded vowels. 

The relief is replaced almost instantly by guilt, for not seeing him, for being happy to see him when you were the reason you hadn’t seen each other. 

His shoulders loosen and he continues forward, stooping to pick up your busted lighter with a grunt. “I got one,” he says, digging in his front jean pocket. 

He has the grace not to say anything about you smoking, not even something teasing, as he places the lighter in your hand and curls his fingers around yours. You jerk back for just a moment, the last vestige of your will to release him from the burden of you, before you melt into it. 

Not before you see the flash of hurt across his features. 

You’re finally able to light up, and Joel doesn’t release your hand.

Joel said he would quit, too, when you told him numbly in his truck after seeing his house, to make it easier, to not have cigarettes on offer for you anymore. 

It’s sweet and you wish you could hate him for it. He shouldn’t care, but he does. It shouldn’t matter to him, but it does. Or maybe he blames you for starting up the habit regularly again, and it’s a good enough excuse to stop. 

Apparently also still carrying a lighter around. For you? Or—

“Are you still smoking, Joel?” 

He clears his throat a little awkwardly, crossing his arms as he leans against the side of your car. “Harder than I remember it being the first time around. Quittin’.” He shakes his head and looks away from you, jaw tightening. “Made it easier to cope.” 

“Cope with what?” 

His gaze latches onto yours, and he waves a noncommittal hand. “Just,” he starts too loudly, a poor lie. “Nothin’. Nothin’.” 

You smile. “Okay, cowboy.”  

You inhale greedily and hold the smoke in your lungs until an ache convulses in your chest. 

The cloud of smoke lingers around you in the still air when you breathe out, before passing the cigarette to him. He takes a long drag, eyes not leaving yours. “You okay?” 

“Long day,” you murmur softly. “I’m all right.”

He grunts softly, and steps closer to you. “Long couple weeks. Longest I haven’t seen you, I’d reckon”

You can tear your hungry eyes away from him, the thickness of his arms across his chest, graying hair, the veins in his hands. The sky is a satin pink behind him, whisps of violet, bruised clouds still dissipating in the distance.

“End of the semester,” you shrug and smile, trying to remember that you’re supposed to be putting distance where there’s familiarity, quitting him like a bad habit, and not quite managing it. 

The itching memory of him is like something rough dancing over your skin. You want to pick it off, scratch it out—

You want to be stronger than you are, tell him things between you have run their course, but you can’t make yourself. You aren’t ready to release this feeling in your chest. Even if ending it would make things easier.

You don’t want to hurt him, then feel stupid for thinking you could. He threads your fingers together, keeps them knotted in a little nest against his chest. “Well, I’m glad you made it out now.” 

“Sorry—” The word pitches out of you, splatters on the ground in a messy heap. 

He shakes his head, watches you carefully as you shakily lift the cigarette to your mouth again and inhale. “I know you’re real busy.” He clears his throat a little awkwardly, like there’s something he wants to say or ask, but ultimately doesn’t. 

You step closer to him, into the circle of his arms, smoke curling in looping patterns around your head like cancerous halos. “I missed you,” you murmur, and that, at least, is true. He’s an ache in your bones, wire wrapped around your throat. 

But you feel soothed now, under a street lamp with him, smoke unfurling against a pink sky, tugging you closer. Something like peace settles in you.

“Mhm.” You pass the cigarette back and forth, until it’s down to the filter and drop it to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of your shoe. 

“Let me take care of you.” You murmur, gripping the front of his shirt in both your hands, an apology with your body on offer. You’ll do anything he wants. “Joel?” 

He reaches up and cups his hands around your wrists. His thumbs stoke slowly along the inside of your wrists. “You sure you’re okay?” 

“Mm.” 

He tilts your face toward his. 

It’s fine that you let him stoke your arm and lean his face close to yours. It means nothing, the way it always means nothing with men. Joel means nothing, his touch means nothing. If you wanted, you could step away and say things need to end. You know you could, but you don’t, you drift closer, the sea pulled by the moon. 

You could stop the tide, you think desperately, you could stop the march of time, the circle of the planets; you could lean down and hold your torch to the field and watch it all burn. 

But any remaining resolve to do so has fled. You’re too comfortable, too willing to sink against the warmth of his chest, the lull of his voice.

He clears his throat again and eyes flicking over your face before landing on your eyes. The hesitation only lasts a moment longer, before he comes out with it. “You wanna come out with me this evenin’ instead?” 

You blink, surprised, letting Joel draw you in closer, tighter, until your hips are flush against his. His hands anchor low on your hips, at the curve of your ass. “Oh Joel,” you coo, “you know I’ll go anywhere with you.” You look at him from beneath your lashes. An expression flashes across his face, so brief and esoteric, you wouldn’t even dare to hazard a guess at what it meant. Despite yourself, you brace. 

His hand flattens against your spine, travels up and down your back, until your muscles release. “So what’s your real answer?” 

You feel dizzy with the sudden twist, your thoughts forced elsewhere. 

A thread of anxiety wraps around your belly and squeezes tight, biting, like razor wire. Anger surfaces next. He’s not following your script, knows too much. The feeling of his tranquilizing hand circling your spine suddenly feels like sandpaper, gritty and rough, scraping you raw and naked.

“C’mon,” he teases, tapping your hip gently, his shoulders finally loosening, “it ain’t a hard question.” 

You suck in a breath to steady racing thoughts, the wonder and fear that mix in your gut that he knows just what to say and do to calm you, that he knows the steps of your dance well enough to avoid your feet. You try again for coquettish, trying to recapture the familiar playfulness. “Well, do you want me to fuck you here or there?”

But he evades your pull into your familiar pattern again, gives you nothing to orient yourself around, to his wants. When did you get so fucking obvious? You’re better than this, better than that at this. “I wanna know what it is you want to do.” 

It gives nothing away, about what he wants you to say. You don’t know the right answer, the next step, and you’re left floundering. “Where would we go?” You ask eventually.

“It’s a surprise.” 

For a moment, you consider slipping your hand between your bodies and grabbing him through his jeans, whisper I want you to fuck me, seductive and just a tad whiney. 

It would make things simpler. It would make quitting him easier, when you got around to it. 

But his hand is soft on your cheek, like caressing, protective armour, and you’re tired. 

You desperately want to close your eyes and let him lead you toward a surprise, toward something you get the sense he’s sunk a lot of thought into. 

“Surprise me, then,” you say softly, the words barely audible, voice stolen from the cave of your mouth. “Joel.” 

“Cherry,” he answers, just as gentle. “Good girl. Knew you’d make the right choice.” 

Oh. 

How are you ever going to give him, give this, up? 

His hand is a familiar warmth on your spine. The longest dance you’ve spun through with him, leading you across the parking lot, offering a hand up into the cab. 

Joel braces an arm against the top of the still open doorway and looks at you for a long moment. “What?” 

“Nothin’.” He shakes his head, then nods once and looks down, his other hand anchored on his hip. “Glad you’re here, is all.” 

“You just want to see my tits.” 

“Wouldn’t mind it,” he answers, grinning suddenly back. “But I mean it. Don’t know what to do with myself without you on the weekend.” 

“There’re other girls, Joel. Can recommend a few.” 

He shakes his head slowly. “No there ain’t.” 

.

.

.

He drives with one hand on your thigh and the windows down, and catches you up on what he hadn’t been able to relay in your short, infrequent phone calls over the last few weeks. 

You forget why you need to quit him, release him back into the sea, watch the silver flash of scales disappear beneath a wave, an addict surrounded by your fix. But then he’ll mention the ranch, and all those photos, all the things you’d agonized over, will flash through your mind. 

You wonder if you’re being fair, or rational. If maybe you’re pushing him away because you aren’t really sure what it means to be close to someone, like this or otherwise. 

Given the chance, maybe he would tell you more about his life in time. It’s a rough thing to bring up unannounced to anyone, let alone someone like you. Your stomach twists into thick knots, the threads of all the things unspoken between you wrapping around your throat like a vise. 

Maybe the short of it is that you aren’t worth telling, that maybe you aren’t worth much at all, despite the way he makes you feel. 

But some part of you wants to believe it’s all still possible, that you could confess your lie and Joel would understand why you’d done it, that he hadn’t meant anything to you yet, like you hadn’t meant anything to him yet. That he would see past that number, past the guilt and shame, to the connection you share, and tell you it’s okay, it doesn’t matter much, not between the two of you. 

Humiliation and fear and self-hatred follows the bubbly pink hopefulness. Only someone delusional would have hope for something like that. To wish to sit in a confessional with your lover and still not be enough. 

Because it wouldn't be, even if Joel was okay about the age difference, the lie, and the things he hadn’t told you were because it was too painful to speak about and not because you didn’t belong in his life and he doesn’t want you there. Even if all of that were true, you are too indebted to him for it to matter. 

You live off of his money. Entering into a real relationship. . .you wouldn’t be able to survive, and to have him finance your life entirely, receive nothing in return, not even the myth of your body, is unthinkable. Confessing means giving up more than you’re willing to admit, it means not being able to afford your apartment, it means giving up on school, the thing you’d done so many horrible things for.

The most rational part of you knows none of it matters. No man wanted to enter into a dependent relationship with a used up whore. 

You’ll never know if you don’t just say it, but you’re terrified. 

It’s easier to just break things off, and never find out where you stand. The thought of going back to the club, fucking men that aren’t Joel, to learn again and again what they want, who you’re supposed to be for them, makes your throat close. 

“Baby? You hear me?” His voice filters in from a long distance, then surfaces all at once. The wind is soft and sweet against your skin. The truck smells like desert air, laden with the scent of  red dust, sagebrush, and lavender, mixed with softened leather and the smell of Joel’s skin, sun warmed bergamot.

“No,” you murmur. “Sorry, sweetheart. Say it for me again.” 

He shakes his head and squeezes your thigh. “Just askin’ how your exams went.” 

“Okay, I think,” you hazard. “I’ll know more after the holidays.” 

“Sure you aced it,” he says, voice soothing and gentle. “My smart girl.” 

Butterflies flutter in your chest, prideful. He’s pretty washed in the last orange rays of the sunset, shadows playing across his veiny hands, his wide spread thighs. “If you want me to suck your dick you can just ask.” 

He shakes his head, rolls his eyes. “Jesus.” 

“Say it again.” 

“What?” His voice is light, teasing.

“You know what.” 

“Maybe I want you to hear you ask it.” His fingers trace up and down your thigh, leaving imprints of warmth on your skin, the air cool in the wake of it. “Like it when you need somethin’ from me.” 

You tilt your head, watching him, the strong line of his jaw, the cast of his eyes over the road. His hair is longer than when you first met him, curling behind his ears. “You know I like you even when I don’t need something?” 

“That so?” 

“Mm.” You reach over to stoke the backs of your fingers over his beard. “Please say it again.” 

“Well, how could I say no to that? My girl,” he says, and you like that even better. “My smart girl. I know you aced it.” 

Something self satisfied curls around your ribs and licks down your spine. Instead of answering you unbuckle your seatbelt and push yourself across the bench seat, rebuckling the middle belt across your lap, just to be closer to him. 

You lean your head on his shoulder and feel his body relax, sinking back into the worn leather. “Tell me where you’re taking me.” 

“We’re almost there,” he answers by not answering you. “We got a little time though. You hungry?” 

“No.” 

“You wouldn’t say it if you were.” 

“That’s not true.” 

“We don’t have to have sex.” 

Guilt, shame, teasing threads of humiliation and treacherous hope, that he knows you don’t like to have sex when you’ve eaten, that this is the second time since you’ve known him that he’s reassured you your hunger came first.

“Joel—”

“Or you can just lie there for once and I’ll do all the work.” 

“Not sure your knees could stand that.” 

“Funny.” 

You giggle and wave a hand before you, swatting away errant self ridicule. “For the record, you do do most of the work. But if I knew where we were going I could tell you for sure if we should stop for something to eat. Does this activity have snacks?” 

“It does.” 

“Then I’m really good.” 

He seems satisfied with that as the sun disappears and darkness settles around you, like the spill of ink across the velvety folds of midnight blue on the horizon. The rest of the drive is quiet, the steady drip of old country songs from the radio, crooning on about love more often than not. 

The land beyond the windshield is rubbed in charcoal, acres of empty land broken only by cacti and yellowing scrubbrush. A crescent moon rises on the horizon, a bedrock of stars. You’re just starting to drift off when the truck slows and turns off the highway, onto a dirt road that winds on until a neon sign appears.

 “A drive-in?” You murmur sleepily. 

His cheek brushes your forehead, you want to believe he’s kissing you. “Ever been to one?” 

“When I was really little, I think.” 

“Used to come here with Tommy when I was a teenager,” he says as he brings the truck to a gentle stop behind the trail of red tail lights leading into the distance. “On weekends usually.” 

“To make out with girls in the backseat of a car?” 

He chuckles, the line inches forward. “More Tommy than me.” 

Yet he was the one who accidentally got someone pregnant at nineteen. A mistake you know he wouldn’t change for anything, but that had altered the path of his life. He had also been a teenage boy that had taken responsibility for things, that ended up the primary and then only care for that child. It’s rare, so rare, and you don’t think he realizes it. 

He thinks nothing of it. 

You wonder what he was like as a kid, a teenager. If you would have met him then, at the same age, would you have liked each other? Would he have made out with you in the back of some car?

But in this reality, when he was nineteen, you weren’t yet born, and wouldn’t be for several years. You age gap spans lifetimes, and he would have been like to met your mother then. 

“I’m sure you broke your share of hearts,” you tease, not lifting your head from his shoulder. “What movie are they playing?” 

He clears his throat, shifting in his seat. “A double feature. Couple old westerns.” 

“Must be real old then,” you say without thinking.

 But Joel just laughs. “Watch it,” he says softly. “I did watch ‘em when I was a kid though, and they were old then, so I doubt you’ll be overly familiar.” 

“So you just needed some company to watch a movie.” 

“Ain’t that what you are?” 

He means it as a joke, you can hear it in his voice, but it sinks a heavy weight in your chest. You sit up straight, leaning away from his shoulder. 

“Did think you might like it though,” he muses, unaware of the turmoil rolling around inside you like a loose marble, knocking into every live wire nerve inside your body, scratching a hand over his beard, nodding to himself. “Lots of horses in ‘em.” 

The whirring, anxious part of your mind settles again and you snort. “Don’t make it weird.” 

It’s finally your turn at the ticket booth, Joel forking over twenty dollars for the two of you in exchange for a pair of speakers and a cragged, ripped ticket with the number twenty-two stamped into it. 

The number makes your stomach give a vinegary, sour squirm. It feels like an omen, a reminder from a force bigger than yourself. 

“What’s the number, darlin’?” Joel asks as he navigates the rows of cars. 

You crumple the paper in your fist and smile. “Twenty-two.” If the expression on your face betrays the tightness squeezing around your ribcage, roping around your heart it feels like it might pop, Joel doesn’t say anything. 

He backs into your allotted space, and pops open his door. 

You’re still gathering up the speakers when he opens your door. “Joel?” He cups his palm against your elbow. “Maybe it would be better to park the other way?” You ask, worried about sitting on the tailgate for so long, unforgiving metal against the backs of your thighs and legs in a skirt, even if it is longer. 

But the worry is unfounded, because he reaches into the tiny backseat of the cab and retracts several blankets. 

“Oh.” 

“Uh-huh,” he taps your thigh, gently nudging you out of his way. “You think I’d let you sit like that?” 

“Listen, baby,” you begin, a complaint on your tongue. “The amount of men who would let me bruise my tailbone on their tailgate is astounding.” 

“Don’t doubt it, Cherry” he says, lowering the gate. “I ain’t them. Tailbone is safe with me.” 

You rub a hand up his spine, lean in close so your mouth brushes his ear. “I know. The whole area, shall we say, is safe with you.” 

“Just sit down,” he grumbles. “Accussin’ me of makin’ out with girls here. How you think I accomplished that?” 

“So you did,” you poke him in the side. He grunts and it sounds half like a laugh. “Heartbreaker,” you accuse. “And a gentleman. Rare. Very rare.” 

“Uh-huh,” he grouses, pushing a folder blanket into your hands, “Why don’t you just go on and fix that how you want it, honey?” 

Chuckling, you perch at the end of the truckbed and help him unfold a couple of thick blankets, shifting to your knees to fix the edges. His hand lands briefly on the back of your thigh, sliding up and down before he retracts his touch. “All good?” You ask. 

“Mm. What do you want to eat?” 

You lie back, legs dangling off the end of the truckbed. Joel’s hand curls around the back of your knee in the dark, thumb stroking the soft skin there. It’s automatic, natural, the way he slots between your legs. 

“Popcorn, of course.” 

“‘Course. Anything else?” 

“Can we eat somewhere else later?” 

He looks surprised but only for a moment. “Yep. Anywhere y’want.” 

You nod and sit up, sliding your fingers up his forearm, before moving to the back of the truck and adjusting yourself amid the pillows and blankets. He chuckles. “Guess I’ll go get it myself then.” 

“D’want me to come?” You ask, resting your cheek on the cool metal side of the truck. “I can come with you.” 

He shakes his head, strokes your cheek gently when he moves to the side of the truck. “Anything else, princess?” 

“Don’t call me that, cowboy.” 

“Well?” 

“Coke,” you cup your hand against his, press it more firmly into your cheek. “Cherry coke.” 

He rolls his eyes, crinkling pleasantly at the corners. Your belly tightens. “Woulda been worried if you didn’t want cherry.” 

His hand slides away from your face and you watch him walk away, toward the glowing neon of the concession stand that you can just make out in the distance. The lot is all trampled, dusty dirt, shouting children and chattering adults, a looming blank white screen in the distance. The blanket is soft against your skin. The cooling air still holds the day’s heat in greedy fingers, but you feel lazily content. 

Curdling, curling, vulture-like anxiety of the last few days, a faded afterthought. Worry seems very far away as you turn your face up and watch the stars wheel overhead, like holes in the night sky, like criss-crossed, pinioned wings of something ancient.

Joel returns just as sleep begins to embed itself in your veins, the looping angularity of his scent billowing up from the blankets like a softly sung lullaby. 

“Cher?” The bed of the truck sinks with his added weight. The backs of his fingers brush your cheek as he settles in, leaning back against the stacked pillows. 

“Joel. Are we going to make out?” 

“Sure, if you want.” 

You grumble and take the fountain drink he offers you as you sit up. “Don’t sound too enthusiastic about it.”

He shakes his head, mouth twitching. “Hold on, honey,” he says, layering his hand over yours. Condensation from the cup cool on your wrist, beading down your arm. “They didn’t have cherry—”

“Regular is okay.” 

“Well, it ain’t that either. They had cherry syrup, had ‘em put some of that in.” 

“You didn’t have to do that.” 

“Well, it might taste like shit so don’t get impressed yet.” 

You take a sip, raising a brow at him. 

The first gulp is all syrup which makes you cough and Joel laugh, but when you mix it, it’s pretty good. “If I said I hated it?” 

“Guess I’d go back.” 

It’s too familiar, too gentle, the way he wraps his arm around your shoulders and settles back with you. The flickering white light of the screen playing across his features, blinking down from ten. You curl into his chest with your drink and resign yourself to this not being the day you quit.

It’s so easy to fall into the familiar grooves of your relationship, just like the weekend you had ridden horses, you begin to forget, to dream again of a life where you aren’t his sugarbaby, one in which your age doesn’t matter. To dream of a world where you open your mouth and tell him the truth and everything works out. 

The movie is entertaining in a gimmicky kind of way, shootouts and ragdolling bodies and weeping widows and towns that need saving by a lone man with a gun and a horse, full of desert vistas and stilted dialogue.

“He looks like you,” you tell Joel of the main character, gruff and grumbly. 

“I do not,” he says, stoking the skin of your hip where your shirt had ridden up. 

“Joel, he’s your spitting image. He even plays the guitar like you,” you point at the screen as the cowboy in question finishes cleaning his gun to put a guitar over his lap and begin strumming it, the red flicker of the onscreen camp fire illuminating the plains of his face, a dog at his feet. 

“Maybe I was lyin’ about that,” he says, sarcasm thick in his graveled voice. 

“And here I was hoping you might sing to me one day.” 

He’s quiet for a while after that, fingers stroking your spine, pulling a spare blanket over your shoulders when you shiver once, just slightly. His chest is warm; the steady thud of his heart, the heady, thick scent of his skin. 

A brief window of anxiousness flares within you when you feel too settled, brushing salt and grease from the hot, buttery popcorn on your fingertips against a napkin. You think to offer to jerk him off under the blanket but ultimately let the nervous thought fade away. He clearly wants this, as it is, for whatever reason. 

There’s an intermission between movies, the corny soundtrack playing as people get up to stretch. 

You’re plucking cherries out from amid the ice in your cup, left over from the syrup, tying knots in the stems and handing them over to Joel who lines them up like prizes on the edge of the truck. 

“Want some more?”

“If you please, baby.” 

He takes your cup with him, and you wolf whistle as he walks away. It draws a few looks, and maybe that’s why a few minutes later, Tommy Miller and a woman you vaguely recognize from photos are standing at the edge of the truck while you adjust your top even though you're decent and covered and not even wearing your old club clothes. 

Tommy’s smile is easy, his hand against the woman’s back. “Howdy, I think this is my brother’s truck. You know him?” 

“Joel,” you blurt. “Yeah, yes.”

He waits, clearly waiting for you to offer who you are and why you’re there. 

You have never had to confront someone’s family members, mainly because you fucked them once and never saw them again but you’ve known Joel for close to a year now, and his brother is standing in front of you with a woman close to his age that must be his wife, and he doesn’t know who you are or what your name is or that you’re his brother’s whore. 

“I, um—” 

The smile starts to slide off of Tommy’s face at your lack of explanation. Your throat feels dry and you don’t know what to say. What can you say? That will satisfy them enough that they’ll walk away and that also won’t cause problems for Joel? What’s a good enough excuse that he would have a twenty-something in his truck? 

Thankfully you’re saved from answering by the sudden return of Joel, carrying your drink. “Tommy.” 

“Hey, big brother.” Tommy’s face lifts back into a bright smile.

You feel suddenly very young and out of place, like a child sitting at the adult’s only table, curled on your knees while the rest of them stand in a half circle, unreachable. For one horrible moment, it seems like Joel won’t introduce you, that you’ll sit there, so close and far away at the same time. 

A physical, stark reminder that you don’t belong, even if you and Joel might be deluded enough to believe it, no one else ever would. It’s even worse than the photos you’d seen. An adrift, lonely feeling snags around your heart, webs over the already festering, breaking wounds, desperately tries to hold the splintering fragile pieces of you together. A drifting disconnection pressing in at you, the way it hasn’t in so long. 

The  air is wobbly and creased with wavering, pale light. You feel far away from yourself, disconnected from your body, which used to happen all the time but doesn’t anymore. Not since Joel, not since you haven’t had to sleep with random men each weekend that might do anything to you. 

Your chest hurts, and it’s a little hard to breathe. 

A whine in your ears makes it impossible to hear them. 

“—my brother, Tommy. His wife, Maria.” The sound of Joel’s voice is submerged in water, lost beneath icy waves, but it draws you closer to the surface, and you can almost see the sun beyond the crushing roll of the surf. “Tommy, Maria, this is Cherry.” 

“Hi,” you say, voice steady, bubbly, despite the dizzying rush of full bodied sound pulsing through your skull all at once, the static noise of the projector pulsating a grainy grayish-white behind them, the staccato sound of overlapping voices. “Nice to meet you.” You almost say you’ve heard a lot about him but you aren’t sure how much you’re supposed to know, so you shut your mouth and smile, pleasant, relaxed. 

You shake their hands in turn.

“What are you two up to out here?” 

“You’re actually crashing my date, little brother.” 

You think it’s funny how they call each other that, little brother, big brother, very much trying not to focus on the other part of his sentence, buoyed by it. But what else should he say?

Hey Tommy, this is my prostitute? 

Sure. 

“Date, huh? Someone finally loosened my brother up enough for that?” Tommy is looking at you closely, his hand still around yours. He loosens his grip and lets your hand fall. “Well maybe we’ll see you at the next family get together.” 

Not a chance in hell. 

“Well I am a party kind of girl.” 

“We’ll leave you to it.” 

Joel and Tommy say their goodbyes, Maria eyeing you with a gaze that says she knows, or at least suspects, and doesn’t approve. Her stare is icy when it lands on Joel. Confusion pounds behind your eyes, that her ire is directed at her brother-in-law and not at you. 

After they walk away, Joel hands you the new cherry coke and doesn’t comment on what just happened. “They know, Joel,” you say softly, just in case he’s in denial. “Maria definitely does.” 

He nods. “Yep, and she ain’t exactly happy about it.” 

He doesn’t seem concerned as he sits next to you again, shoulder pressing into yours in a vaguely comforting way. 

“Arent you worried they’ll think you’re a dirty old man?” 

It’s the worst possible joke, at the worst possible moment. The flat delivery of your voice doesn’t help, but you still feel shaken. 

He laughs, “Maybe I’m embracin’ it.” 

Where the encounter has planted a knot of worry deep inside you, writhing and alive, it’s seemed to have calmed Joel. He takes a sip of his own drink and seems buoyed. You can’t parse it, peering up at him from where he tucked his arm around your shoulders, the way his mouth twitches. 

“Relax,” he says gently. “You’re all right, baby. It ain’t nothin’ to worry about.” 

The screen flickers, and another title screen appears. 

You feel all right, strangely, in the cradle of his arms, with his careful reassurance in your ear. And however contrived it might be, to get you through the next movie in peace, you don’t care. You let the worry ease out of you. 

If Joel was really okay with his family seeing him out with you, seemed unconcerned by it, then you shouldn’t worry about it either.

But a nugget of unease lingers, wedged between your ribs. Maria’s livid gaze. She would say something to her husband, who might just have something to say to Joel about it. 

It doesn’t stop you from falling asleep on his chest, listening to the even, relaxed sweep of his breath through his lungs. 

. 

.

.

When you wake, it’s eerily quiet. 

The hum of conversation and the scratchy play of the old movie is gone, replaced with the empty sound of wind flowing across desert, the rustle of scrubby grass and chitter of small creatures. The night sky is a fathomless, deep black, the stars a bright streak through the middle. 

Joel’s arms are tight around you, breath slow and even against the back of your neck. He’s sleeping. In the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with only a crescent moon, perched thin and curious in the corner of the sky. 

There’s something untouchable, and far away about sleeping beneath the sky. It makes you feel small and insignificant, but in a pacifying way. You’ve made mistakes, inadvertently and of your own choices, but what did any of it matter in the grand scheme of the universe, the stars chasing themselves around the heavens. 

“Joel?” You mumble, rubbing his forearm curled over your belly. “I think we’re alone.” 

“Mm, you were sleepin’,” he mumbles, arm tightening across your spine when you turn in his arms to face him. “Looked like you ain’t been.” 

Oh. 

Maybe he’s saying you look like shit. But you think you know Joel well enough now to know that isn’t what he means. It means you look exhausted, it means he wants to help you not feel that way

You feel a little disgruntled. All your best laid plans are up in smoke, a curlicue of a god’s ringing laughter. You were meant to break things off with him, instead he tricked you into resting. If he’d woken you up, you would have gone through the familiar dance of soliciting him, offering your body to him, feeling guilty that you hadn’t already, not really. 

Maybe you should try not to, but you feel removed from your life and his, the encounter with his family, the stress and acrid, bubbling anxiety of the last few weeks seems distant and unimportant. There’s only you and him, suspended in amber on the surface of some remote and distant planet. 

“So we’re trespassing so that I can sleep?” 

He chuckles. “I know the guy who owns this place. He don’t mind.” 

“What if a murderer is out here?” You stage whisper, tucking your nose against his collarbone, breathing him in deeply. If you concentrate hard enough, you swear you can smell hay beneath his usual leather and bergamot and salt. 

You kiss his throat, feel the hitch in his voice when he answers you, “Ain’t likely.” 

He tastes like salt, too. 

You kiss the underside of his jaw, trace your tongue over the bristles of his beard. It kind of tickles, kind of stings. His hand slips beneath your shirt, flattens it against the ridge of your spine, thick fingers wrapping around the cage of your ribs. “Guess I just have to trust you on that.” 

“Mm, wouldn’t let nothin’ happen to you.” 

A hot well of emotion opens in the back of your throat, rises to the tip of your tongue. You bite it back, softly spoken words, caresses that would eventually turn to burning slaps. 

You kiss him instead, opening your mouth against his to slip your tongue past his lips. You press a hand inside his shirt, skin achingly hot, roving over the dips in his back, muscle in his shoulders, the curl of dark chest hair against your fingertips. 

Joel tastes like popcorn, but mostly like cherries from your drink, the dark bubble of soda. He feels like a warm Saturday spent in the sun, a backyard barbecue, the tuck of a blanket around sleeping shoulders.

He groans against your mouth when you roll your hips against his, and pulls your knee over his hip. But nothing else follows, the burning arousal that usually follows simmers low and patient within you. 

And for a long while, you just. . .kiss. Makeout like teenagers and although you’re much closer to your teenage years than Joel, you can imagine him there years ago, making some poor girl fall in love with him, kissing her in the dark during the slower parts of some long forgotten thriller. 

You never had that experience, either in a movie theater or a drive-in but you’re doing it now, with Joel, sucking lightly on his tongue, letting him touch your tits and pinch your nipples until you moan into his mouth. You feel breathless and much younger and much less experienced than you are. You feel unsteady, like a newborn foal on shaky legs. 

His hand slides over your ribs and back as he shifts the other to cradle your face in his palm, rubbing his thumb against your lips when he pulls away. You suck it into your mouth just to watch his eyes go dark, just so he’ll rub the spit against your lips. 

“Miss the lipstick.” 

“I’ll wear it for you sometime.” 

“Good.” 

He kisses you again, tongue exploring your mouth like it's the first time he’s done so, hand laid carefully over your throat without pressure.

You break away with a choke when your pussy flutters, swallows around nothing. He moves his hand between your legs instead, rubs you slowly through your underwear.                       

“You make me want to believe,” you murmur. The words are pulled from the depths of your lungs, gasping and truthful in a terrible, consuming way. You don’t mean to say it and can’t find the words to take it back, sweaty and needy and warm beneath the blanket with him. 

You kiss the pad of his thumb and don’t look at him, examining the fold of his collarbone against his t-shirt instead. 

He frowns, blinks down at you. “Believe what?” 

You shake your head and keep stroking his cheek and neck, feeling the ghost of his breath against your lips. “Just that. That you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” 

“You don’t believe me?” 

“I’m just used to no one caring.” His chest expands, you feel the intake on your palm when you press it there, veins of breath and remorse and a pulsing, hollow ache. “But you do. Even when it’s something silly.” 

Maybe it’s the dark, the tumbling vastness of the universe overhead, the feeling of his heart beating wet and bloody in your hand, but you continue. “I was so naive. The first time. I thought because I’d had sex before that I could do it no problem. It couldn’t be hard to just. . .fuck someone.” 

Joel cups your cunt and then shifts his touch to your back. “Yeah,” he says, encouraging. “Go on, darlin’.” 

You swallow, tighten your fingers in his shirt. “But then I was there. Getting stares, men wondering. I could tell they were wondering if I was what they were hoping I was. But I was so shiny and new.” 

Joel, to his credit, doesn’t try to interrupt you, tell you it’s in the past. He listens, and you can feel the thin pulse of anger on your behalf, tying a tight bow around his chest. His palm keeps stroking your spine. 

You weren’t meant to give anything else up, not after seeing all those pictures on the walls, all the things in his own history he never trusted you with, but you can’t stop yourself. You were supposed to break it off, today. 

Instead, you’re curled in his arms, whispering your sorrows and truths into his chest, sticking your memories between his ribs, to take root or to wither and die, remains to be seen.

He sees you, that you can’t deny. There’s nothing false in this moment. 

“And I was so scared. I didn’t think I’d be scared, and the only thing I kept thinking was that I was becoming a statistic. One I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life.” You burrow closer to him, whisper the next part against his shoulder. “I was about to leave. I couldn’t do it. I’d just have to accept the life I was supposed to have and stop fighting it.” 

There’s a light squeeze at your hip, the stroke of a trusted hand down your thigh to your knee and back again, devoid of lust for anything more. 

You close your eyes and rest your chin on his shoulder. “It was nothing, compared to other stuff that would happen, but the first time is always the worst, I think. He was nice to me, helped me relax, made me feel special, but I think he just wanted to ruin something new and fairly innocent.” 

You don’t tell Joel the awful details of it, that he doesn’t need to know. “I had to pull over on the way home and throw up and my knees got all bloody and scratched, but in a way I was grateful. He threw me into the deep end and I had to swim or sink. I swam, my dream wasn’t dead yet. I went back the next night and he fucked me again. He was. . .nicer I guess, the second time.” 

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, seeming truly upset. “Cherry—”

“And then you came along,” you barrel on. “And I’ve forgotten every single lesson, because I didn’t have to learn any lessons with you. So I’m stupid and I believe. I believe you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” 

He tilts your head up in careful hands. “You know you ain’t deserve any of this right?” You don’t answer and he tucks you into his chest again. “My girl,” he murmurs. “I wish I’d met you sooner.”

“Me too.” You grip him hard and feel yourself detaching, floating away from the memories that threaten to bubble to the surface with the retelling of the first time. You need help grounding yourself to this moment, to him, present and attentive beside you. “Can we have sex?” 

“You sure, darlin’?” 

You nod, already working on the button of his jeans. “Yeah. I need to. . .I want to feel close to you.” 

Joel grunts when your fingers curl around him. He’s warm and velvet in your hand, and you want to suck his cock but you want him to fuck you more. You stroke him slowly, thumbing at the slit until he groans, jeans pushed down around his knees. 

He bunches your skirt around your hips and tugs your panties to the side, sheathing himself inside you, the fit snug, a pleasantly achy stretch after weeks away from each other.

“How do you want me, baby?” Hand kneading the meat of your hip, the lascivious curve of our waist. 

“Just like this,” you pant, moving your body in time with him, a delicate push and pull.

“Okay,” he shushes you, “All right. Good girl. I’m always glad when you tell me what you want.” 

You shiver and arch into him.

It’s slow, a careful, mindful building, push and pull. Heat pulses between you, waves of pleasure that crest and crash in a matter of minutes or hours or years.

Maybe you’ve been out in the Texas night, unfurling, unraveling, each other for decades. 

He comes inside you as your pussy convulses around him, words pressed to your skin that hurt. He’s got you, you’re okay now. 

For now, maybe, you think when he presses your legs over his shoulders, spreads your pussy and folds pleasure into you one well placed movement of his tongue at a time. 

But his brother knows.

And even if you aren’t the one to pop the bubble, outside forces are at work now, and the barrier between your hidden weekends and the outside world has always been thin. 

It is bound to burst.

Previous / Next

[dreamtofus]

𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒 | Joel Miller x reader

↝ other fics | requests? | ao3 | update blog | fic rec | ko-fi

part one– summary | Two strangers and their internal loneliness attract like magnets. Joel is at a loss, stuck—and you are alone, terrified. In the forced, shared space you find that distraction was the easiest way to cope.

content warning | dddne — DUBCON (this is an ongoing theme for a while), coercion, selective mutism on readers behalf, graphic depictions of violence, injury tw, not quite kidnapping/stockholm but reader has nowhere to go, brief mentions of pregnancy (like literally one line), mentions of starvation due to food scarcity but appearances isn't deeply described, mentions of sa and other relating themes, mean!joel, girthy age gap (reader is 20, joel is 54), joel is riddled with guilt but what's new amirite, oral (m receiving), unprotected piv and creampies, if i missed anything please let me know!

author's note: guys this has been sitting in my drafts finished for almost a year and this new picture has sparked a fucking fire in my docs over this series (another one? yeah i know), this is probably the heaviest thing (for me) i have ever written? so just, be warned. i don't have a timeline for this, i'm literally just vibing it out as i am with most fics lately and if you see a tag you don't like. don't read. you're responsible for the work you consume. a full list of triggers/warning can be found on the masterlist.

word count —10k

part two | part three | strangers masterlist

“She’s a stray, look at her.”

Two pairs of eyes stare back, across the dimly lit room. You’re curled up in the chair, thick leather coat lined with wool draping your shoulders and your toes curled around the edge of the seat, hands balled up near your chest as you savor the warmth.

It was the first time in a month that you’ve seen a fire—sure, you’ve tried to build one. But, you never quite got it and usually ended up burning yourself in the process and added onto the litany of other scars left as memories and reminders on your skin.

Survival—while you weren’t good at it, you did what you had to. Pure, primal instinct. Find shelter, find food, get safe. Don’t die.

Your nose was bloody, lips chapped and cracking, running on a few hours of sleep over the last several days. Place to place, you had to keep running. If you didn’t, they would catch you, surely.

Your muscles ache as they had a moment to relax, legs sore from walking miles and miles, the lingering cuts and scabs that hadn’t healed from your own clumsiness and a mix of being at the end of a blade of a man with too much pride to allow you to damper the moment.

You licked your lips and your eyes flitted away, staring out the window and counting the string of illuminated, plastic orbs hanging on the house across from the one you were currently being interrogated in—the men were still looking at you. Your outer stoic expression hid away the trembling fear you kept inside. They were waiting for you to speak.

That never came.

“You got a name?”

You shake your head, eyes quickly averting in a different direction.

The two men were similar in build—tall and stocky, large and filled out bodies built of muscle and years of hard labor, older based on the grays littering their well-kempt hair and trimmed beards. One has hair that curls just beyond his ears, a warmer brown than the other mans.

They both pull the same expression—complete and utter confusion.

Nearly identical. Oh, they’re brothers.

If not, they sure did bicker like it.

“She’s pullin’ our fuckin’ leg, Tommy.” 

Your ears perk up, assigning the name to a face. He seemed softer than the other man, less weathered and guilt-ridden. It wasn’t like you knew anything about these men, but you’ve learned to identify as much as you could within a couple looks. 

Figure them out. 

What do they want? What can you give them?

Tommy rounds the table separating you from him, a safe, protective distance as he presses his palm into the chair pushed under the table, fingers curling around the top.

“Listen, you’ve gotta give us something.” Tommy explains, “Given the shape of you, I’m tryin’ to avoid the whole vetting process we go through. We don’t take kindly to raiders or tricks or people looking to cause trouble.”

“We ain’t even got space for her—”

Tommy holds his hand up to the other man, eyes still locked on you.

“Look at me,” His voice is solid, demanding.

But, he’s not yelling. You turn meekly, gripping for the jacket when it slips from your shoulders. Your clothes were torn, jagged edges barely hanging on in some places. Garments soiled and unwashed for weeks and god—you fucking reek. You can smell it, you know they can smell it.

You were a stray feral cat that had scurried up to their doorstep and passed out from exhaustion and while one was attempting to take pity, the other was ready to crush your skull under the weight of his boot.

“Can you talk?” He asks, eyebrows raising slightly in question.

Your tongue rolls against the front of your teeth and you switch your gaze between the two men before shaking your head, a barely noticeable gesture if they hadn’t been staring you down.

You were being truthful—you couldn’t speak. It wasn’t like you’d had your tongue cut out and were ridden with the choice, but quiet has been the only thing that has ever brought you peace.

Familiar phrases echo loudly in your mind.

Don’t speak, be a good girl.

Seen, not heard.

Speak and I will rip your fucking tongue out.

So, no—you can’t talk.

“We’ve got families comin’ in—men and women that are willing to be a hell of a lot more cooperative than this—”

“Joel,” Tommy warns with a voice that shakes the room, causing you to jerk in response and this time he is holding his hand out to you, palm raised as if to ease you down, “we can give her a fair chance, just like we do the others. Grab a piece of paper and pencil,” He points toward a desk tucked against a far wall and Joel's heavy boot stomps follow Tommy’s orders before he’s returning, slapping the items back down on the table and taking a similar stance to Tommy.

You were sandwiched between the two men as they surrounded you, shaking as you took the pencil in your hand and gripped it, fumbling for the paper as you used your fingertips to drag it close.

“Where did you come from?” Tommy asks.

You remember the dark room, chains and screams—blood-curdling screams. One meal a day, if you are good. Constant pacing in the halls, a building in the city holding a much darker secret in the quarantine zone you had been kidnapped and forced to take home in.

Bad place, you write in sloppy handwriting.

Tommy leans to look and his brow furrows, subverting toward Joel who shakes his head at you.

“No—state, city. Anything. Bad place ain’t gonna cut it, kid.”

Kid. 

They’ve never called you a kid before. 

Men like him—he wasn’t them, but they all start to look the same after a while.

Salt Lake? Old QZ in the city.

Joel knows that place had crumbled years ago and quarantine zones were nearly non-existent now. Taken up by people trying to start anew, much like Jackson, but more often than not it was raiders—the filthy kind of people who took without asking and killed first, asked questions never.

He couldn’t blame them, but the handful of years in Jackson has taught him a new approach. It wasn’t his favorite, but it allowed him to sleep easier at night, usually.

“You left on your own?” Joel asks, speaking before Tommy could, likely ready to ask the same question. His insipid tone makes your skin crawl.

You chewed at your bottom lip and your eyelashes touched your cheeks in a flurry of blinks as you scribbled out the one word onto the paper.

Escaped.

The alarm is immediate, Joel’s head snapping up as you push the paper toward the middle of the table and allow the pencil to roll with it.

“Tommy, can I speak to you for a minute?” Joel’s voice is harsh, not nearly the question he posed it as.

Tommy rolls his shoulders and walks around the back of your chair, following Joel into the hallway, hushed voices shocking the tension back into your body as you curl into yourself, crossing your arms over your chest and allowing your eyes to scan the room.

Memorize, categorize—this was one of the men’s houses, of whom you weren’t sure for the moment. 

But, it was stocked with personal items and supplies, a bassinet shoved away in the living room and as you turned that way you noticed a pair of eyes peek around the doorframe leading that way.

A girl, young—not much younger than yourself but she is noticeably more child-like, curious.

Her shoes squeak against the hardwood startling you both and suddenly Joel is reentering the room and directing his voice toward her.

“Go on home,” He speaks to her, his expression washed-out and tired, “don’t linger ‘round here, kiddo.”

“I’m the one who found her,” She seems to take an angle of defense, coming into view. Clothes that hung off her body, not well-fitting and clearly second hand but more intact than your own, “I was on watchtower duty with Dina—”

“Ellie, this doesn’t concern you.”

Ellie rolls her eyes, walking closer regardless of Joel’s words and tossing a knife on the table.

Your knife—the black-handled switchblade closed shut. It still had old, dried blood caked on the handle. It could have been your own, but that was just a lucky guess. That thing had been your lifeline for weeks, moments away from a terrible night of near starvation or a desperate attack on you, it helped keep you safe.

You instinctively reach for it but Joel is quick—unnaturally, as he curls it into his hand and gives you a look of warning.

“This,” He holds it up, the switchblade dwarfed between his large, calloused fingers, “ain’t yours.”

Your lips pull into a thin line, eyes falling to the floor.

Tommy’s tongue clicks against his cheek as he rounds the corner, fingers rubbing at his chin as he paces, his face deep in thought and contemplation as he back steps toward the edge of the table near you, leaning into it and crossing one foot over the other. His hands are tucked away in his pockets.

“That place you escaped—” He looks up toward Joel briefly before his gaze lands on you again, “they gonna come lookin?”

You could tell the truth—you weren’t sure. 

You weren’t the only girl that was locked away in the central tower of that city, the only person who was being used so inhumanely for the needs of others in the most heinous of ways.

Selfish, sick and demented, men who got off on that desperate need for power and control.

So, instead and out of self-preservation, you lie.

Shaking your head, Tommy takes a small breath and nods.

“Alright—I’m trustin’ you. Still, we’ll beef up security for a bit, and add a few extra patrols. You need a place to stay and we’re gonna give you that. But, we got rules.” 

“Rule number one–you earn this,” Joel holds up the knife again before it’s tucked away in his pocket for safekeeping. Your eyes drag toward his pocket, staring daggers into the material.

“You earn your keep—I’m going to give you some time to settle, but eventually we’re going to assign you to a station. You work or you leave, there’s no other way about it.” Tommy continues, “And while I’m more inclined to give you a space of your own, we’re all full up singles and giving you a townhome…well, I’m not so sure that is the best idea.”

You weren’t going to argue—not that you had the will to speak up for yourself now, not when both of their presence were so oppressive. You nod obediently and look over at Joel who is still lingering, like an ugly guard dog ready to bare his teeth at a moment’s notice.

“I’d keep you here, but with my situation I’m not putting anything at risk,” Tommy says and you suddenly realize that this was his home. You weren’t that slow-witted. He had a family, something you were never familiar with. 

But, you understood.

“So, you’ll be staying with Joel.”

It clearly wasn’t his choice, based on the way his teeth clench, jaw flexing as he crossed his arms, fabric stretching over broad shoulders and thick, muscled biceps. His piercing gaze makes you shrink into your chair, if that were possible.

Your nose scrunches slightly, in a faint show of disgust but you quickly collect yourself.

“I’m also gonna suggest you see our doctor, get those bruises checked out. Make sure you don’t have any broken bones and they can stitch up any—”

It forces you into a panic, heart beating rapidly in your chest as the jacket drops from your shoulders, fingers reaching out to wrap around Tommy’s wrist—and, like you had suspected, Joel is quick to grab at your own wrist, ready to tackle you to the ground. It wouldn’t take much given your size difference—he was just...massive, threatening in a way you've never felt. Joel could snap you like a twig, but his restraint is there.

Tommy notices the panic in your eyes—you weren’t trying to attack. You were attempting to communicate in a moment of worry, he nodded and waved Joel off, prying your hand from his arm gently and placing it against your knee.

“Alright, no doctor.” Tommy settles, “For now.”

You slump back and blink away the burning sting of tears that filed your eyes.

“Get her settled in,” He tells Joel, “make sure she eats.”

Joel doesn’t nod, but he moves, backing out of your way and giving you space.

You move slowly, shaking the jacket off your shoulders before Tommy is shaking his head and grabbing hold of the lapel, pulling it back up. You jerky slightly, averting your body from his sudden touch.

“Sorry–just…keep it,” Tommy tells you—it was a look of pure pity, his eyes softening around the naturally hard edges, “I’ll have my wife go searching for some clothes tomorrow, get you out of those and into something clean and better fitting.”

You follow behind Joel to the door, a careful distance as you linger, bracing yourself for the cold crunch of snow under your bare feet.

“And brother,” Tommy calls out—there it was. Joel twists the knob and looks over his shoulder, “don’t go scaring her more than she already is.”

You weren’t sure if it was even possible to feel true fear anymore. 

-

The walk is short, but painful. Small winces that get caught in your throat as you quicken your pace to keep up with Joel, a slight limp to your walk from the bruising on your ribs and the tinge of pain in your hips and pelvis—your body has relaxed for too long, it felt brittle.

You hurt all over, but lately, you could will it all to go numb if you tried hard enough. Disconnect, disassociate, and disappear from your own body.

Eventually, you do meet his front door and you’re enveloped with warmth in a matter of seconds, making your way inside hesitantly as Joel holds the door open. He hadn’t spoken a word since you left the other house, fingers gripping hard on the pair of gloves tucked into his left hand. You look around curiously, the house shrouded in darkness aside from the fireplace ignited and crackling in the far room to your left. Joel moves quietly behind you, placing his belongings on the kitchen counter, but the switchblade is still tucked away in his front pocket, you know that much.

He plucks at a note folded under a magnet on the fridge, reading it to himself silently.

“Come on, kiddo,” He mumbles to himself, realizing it must be from the girl—sounding exasperated as he balls up the paper and tosses it in the trash. He favored that word, but you can’t tell if it’s just a habit. 

You weren’t a kid, not even close. It felt patronizing when it was aimed your way. 

He eyes you carefully, sighing as he presses a hand against the kitchen counter.

“I’m settin’ you up in the basement—none of the other rooms are in good enough condition.” Joel explains, speaking to you in the most civil way he has all night, “nothin’ is off limits except my room. And Ellie’s. She’s out back but you don’t get to go snoopin’ around. Got it?”

You shrug the jacket off but hold it close to your chest, arms crossing over each other as you hug the thick material. You nod slowly.

“Really, nothing?” Joel asks.

All it takes is a look, eyes bleary and sorrowful.

“Go on,” He nods, “there’s a bed down there, a shower, a change of clothes—”

You quickly scurry off, overwhelmed by the intensity of his unwavering gaze and the sound of his voice as it becomes more and more muffled the deeper you trek down the stairs, careful steps on your torn up feet, he seems to finally give up when your feet hit the concrete floor.

It’s still warm here, but not nearly as much. A small rectangular window sits right above the old bed, a mattress on a rusted metal frame that looked like it barely had any life left in it. But, it was an actual bed. Not boxes and a bedsheet, a makeshift pillow made from your dirtied clothes to give the ache in your neck some much needed relief.

There was a small room in the corner, a bathroom that barely managed to fit the necessities you needed—but it was still something. A shower, a toilet, a sink. A mirror that you couldn’t even bother to look in, making your way around the room you find the stack of clean clothes and towels on the coffee table in front of a worn couch, threads pulling apart at the seams on the arms.

You crouch, despite the screaming protest from your body and sift through the pile. A clean shirt, a clean pair of sweats. Underwear—you haven’t had the luxury of clean undergarments in months, often finding that going without was easier. A lump burns in your throat.

You move slowly, tucking the jacket over the edges of the mirror to cover it and placing the clothes on the closed toilet seat as you struggle for a few minutes to figure out the shower, jolting at the touch of hot water when it shoots out from the spout above.

You strip carefully, shirt pulled over your head with a small wince before your fingers are dipping into the waistband of your bottoms, slipping them down your hips and allowing them to drop silently to the floor before you step out of them—the moment the water touches your skin you regret it, the dirtied water pooling at your feet. 

You cry, sob under the spray of water and scrub away every inch of dirt and grime and blood from your body–it hurts, it fucking hurts but you can’t find it in you to stop. You could scrub the skin raw, open up old wounds and make the fresh ones worse, but you’ll settle for red and welted skin. A mix of re-opened gashes and cuts flushed out by the stream of water and your maniacal scrubbing, but at least you didn’t smell like the stench of your own bodily fluids and weeks of built up dirt on your skin, nights of sleeping on wet ground in the woods.

There is a moment of running your fingers through your hair that feels nice, hair still slightly matted from the lack of care but it feels cleaner, as much as you could manage before your arms gave out from exhaustion. You savor the warmth until the water runs cold, heavy footsteps above you shaking the dust from the ceilings. 

Right. You’re not alone. Not anymore.

But, that didn’t bring you comfort either.

You turn off the water and reach for the towel, allowing yourself to get dressed at a careful pace—they must be Joel’s clothes, a plain white shirt that was soft to the touch but clearly worn and a pair of black sweats that had seen better days, the color warped and faded. You manage to slip the socks of your feet with one stumble, hand pressing against the sink to catch yourself.

The jacket remains hung and you flick off the light before taking space on the bed, palms pressed out against the clean, linen sheet, the comforter tucked away against the wall as you laid down, body protesting the entire way.

Eyes squeezed shut, you grit your teeth and pull the comforter over your shoulders.

You try to sleep that night, but it is futile. The light hanging above your bed flickers occasionally—every fifteen minutes to be exact, it had done it thirty two times that night.

–

It never fails—just as you feel yourself drifting off every early morning, Joel is awaking you with the sound of his heavy footsteps and a bag of food. Sometimes a tray or plate. It varied.

You’ve been here three full days now, not counting the night they had taken you in.

You hadn’t left the room, hadn’t asked for a single thing.

Joel was starting to believe that your tongue was cut out—that you were robbed of the ability to speak entirely, but he knows that isn’t the case when he watches your tongue peek out as you take a bite of the scrambled eggs he had grabbed from the town dining hall for you.

You haven’t seen an authentic plate of food in months, and with proper silverware—having half the mind to dig in with your hands before Joel passes you the fork. It was real, warm food. Your stomach growled with greed as you shoveled the food into your mouth quietly. 

Joel watches you with a strange look, not with judgment but a genuine curiosity that he doesn’t act on with questions or crude statements. He waits until you're done, leaning against the door that leads to the rest of the house, only coming near when you press the plate to the floor with a soft clang.

And it continues like that for a couple days—occasional Joel will bring more than food; a book, a magazine, a set of cards. He never explicitly acknowledges the items, but he does leaves it behind. You can’t bring yourself to leave the room, in fear of what you faced outside of here. Even just a few steps into Joel’s kitchen and it made your stomach twist and the bile stir.

Sometimes the food comes in only paper bags, a few at a time and things that didn’t need to be kept cold because when Joel had to go away on patrol he couldn’t watch over you, even if he felt the need to. 

He wasn’t sure if you were going to try and make a break for it, escape over the walls.

He wouldn’t stop you, wouldn’t blame you either. But, the state you're in, he can’t see you surviving more than a day. Bruises were healing, cuts were scabbed up and scarred over. He never tended to your wounds, always allowed you to do that on your own. At least, he assumed you were. You’ve learned to not scamper away as much, taking things from him with minimal contact and a small nod, sometimes allowing a small gesture of thanks with a hand on your chin that you bring downwards. 

Joel only scowls his brow and looks at you confused.

“You stink.” Joel says one day, out of the blue over dinner as he watched by the doorway.

You stop chewing mid-bite and look at him.

“Have you showered at all since the first day?”

Impishly you look away toward the bathroom.

It felt selfish, to overuse the hot water and indulge in the pleasure of the heat—always used to cold showers and the bare minimum of scrubbing yourself down in thirty seconds. It was routine: in, wash, out. There was no enjoyment.

You shake your head after a while and push your plate aside, feeling your stomach turn.

“Go,” He nods as he steps toward you, swiping up the plate in his right hand and leading the way toward the bathroom, noting the way the coat was still hung over the mirror. He doesn’t comment on it, but he nods his head in the direction of the shower.

You look at him slightly unsure, “If I have to force you in there I will,” He says, but there isn’t any real bite behind, although the look in his eyes tells a different story, “there’s plenty of hot water, use it.”

But…

The word lingers in your head.

“I’ll have Ellie grab you some new clothes, somethin’ that fits better.” Joel tells you, “Just get in the goddamn shower.”

You brush past him quietly, beginning to undress yourself without warning which alarms Joel.

“Oh—well, shit. I mean after I left.” Joel turns away and his descending footsteps eventually fade and despite how hard it is to get your body to work, or even move, you shower.

-

You grab the unused towel hanging over the barely clinging metal rack nailed into the wall, wrapping it around your body securely, bare feet pressing against the ground and for the first time in a while, it doesn’t hurt. It’s sore, but it doesn’t sting as harshly as it did.

There’s a suspicious lack of clothing—your dirty ones nowhere in sight, no clean ones either. In fact, the room was practically bare of all trash and old clothing. You ignore the dull pain at your hip, a wound still on the mend and step around the corner of the doorway carefully and hear the sound of footsteps above you, the soft hum of voices until one fades, a door closing following in the wake of the newly discovered sounds. 

The door is open. Joel left the door open.

You stop several feet away, staring out into the hallway, the house was dim aside from the bright glow of flames burning in the fireplace. You feel so strongly to run toward the door and slam it closed, clamber back into bed—fearful that if you left the room then this bubble of safety and protection would be broken. But, there was the small voice in the back of your mind screaming to take a step forward, and then another, until your fingers were lingering over the doorknob and pushing it open further.

You take a step out, only to be met with the chest of someone else running into your arm clutching at the towel wrapped around your body—it couldn’t be anyone but Joel, and of course, you’re right.

He’s staring at you emotionless, aside from the subtle acknowledgment that you had listened to him. 

“Got you a couple sets—something to sleep in, something to wear during the day.”

He doesn’t elaborate, handing the clothes over into your empty hand. You’re halfway in the process of dropping your towel before Joel’s hand is wrapping around your wrist, forcing you to stop.

“Stop doin’ that,” Joel commands, nodding toward the bathroom behind you, peeking over your shoulder in that direction before looking back at him with wide, startled eyes, “privacy—do you understand that?” His voice is slow, almost patronizing.

Privacy wasn’t lost on you—but it had long been a foreign concept. 

You nod.

“Then go, get dressed.” He reprimands, pointing down the hall, a different bathroom then you’ve seen before.

You scurry away with the clothes clutched to your chest, catching a quick glimpse of yourself in the mirror as you step inside the room—it was startling, having not seen your appearances in weeks, days and days of constant guessing, wondering how the time starved in the Wyoming forest had damaged you. 

Physically, mentally, emotionally.

It had taken a toll and it was even more visible than you expected.

You looked rundown, eyes tired and sorrowful. It was pathetic. You tried not to linger for long, noting the appearance of your body and moving on—having to look back at yourself in the mirror was far worse than being attached to it. 

The clothes Joel gave you were thin, fleece pajamas that felt soft to the touch and kind against your still sensitive skin. You exit the bathroom quietly and Joel is nowhere to be found in your immediate vicinity, half-expecting him to be waiting outside the bathroom door. You edge back toward the basement door before you spot him on the couch in the living room, the back of his head and broad, stocky shoulders the only glimpse of him you have.

He seems relaxed, staring off into space as he looks down.

You don’t know where the pull comes from, but it wraps around the ache in your chest and pulls you closer, toward him. The creak in the floorboard gives you away.

“Don’t sneak around,” Joel says, “makes people anxious ‘round here.”

Makes him anxious, clearly.

After a moment of silence, he extends the invitation to join him.

“If you’re cold, sit—got room if you want to sit somewhere closer to the fire.”

He did have quite the sizable living room, a couple couches and a few arm chairs surrounding the otherwise bare living space.

You can see the softness on his face under this light, his eyes drawing up to look at you while his head is still tilted down, his hands rubbing away at his stiff knuckle joints. He keeps flicking his eyes between the two—his hands, you, then back again. 

If he has something he wants to ask, he doesn’t.

You’re silent as you avoid each piece of furniture all together and quietly make your way between his outstretched legs, a perfect place to tuck yourself between as you kneel.

Thank him, he deserves it.

He didn’t strike you as a shy man, but you’ve done this plenty of times before—it was really no different, but this was more of a silent offer than the usual demands you were faced with.

Joel doesn’t move right away, doesn’t even react. 

Until you touch him, your hands gliding over his knees, his thighs, leaning forward to nuzzle your face against his thigh as you pull at his zipper—again, his fingers wrap around your wrist. But, no words follow. You make eye contact with him then, feeling at your most confident and bold when he looks so worried, frightened—the deep feeling of intrigue buried underneath it all.

You pull away from his grip and wrap your fingers around his waistband, pulling slowly until he moves, wordlessly he responds by using his thumbs to push his jeans far enough down that you can comfortably press your hands over the obvious bulge in his boxers—it wasn’t hard or straining, but the touch of your hand against his cock had it growing to that point quickly, his eyes downcast and half-lidded. 

It was like he didn’t want to look, but couldn’t look away. You took it in stride and pulled at his boxers until you could tug his cock free of the confines, watching it spring up against his stomach—thick in every sense of the word and large, much more than any man who’s ever claimed you. Pretty, almost, if you could consider it that. He’s well-kempt and clean which was nice, unusual given the time you lived in now. More importantly, you feel your mouth watering at the prospect of taking him inside, pressing your tongue flat against the tip and swallowing him down.

That has never happened before.

You settled between his legs more comfortably, raising up on scabbed up knees and dragging your fingers delicately along the shaft and down to his balls, watching them tighten at the attention you showed before you’re leaning down to take his cock into your mouth without much of a warning. Joel shifts slightly and you ancitpate him to push you away.

But, really, you just wanted to thank him. It was the only way you’ve learned how.

He breathes out softly, the first sound you’ve heard since you touched him.

You drag your tongue from base to tip, hand pressed his cock flat against it as you circle around the tip before dipping back down, slipping back into the motions so easily it feels mind-numbing.

Your eyes flutter as you force yourself to take him as deep as possible, nearly gagging before you pull away, catching a slight glimpse of him behind bleary, wet eyes. 

His own are wild, hands pressed flat against the cushion, mouth only slightly ajar. But, he won’t look at you. Only the action, your hand wrapped around his shaft, the other pressed against his thigh and he fights off that urge to touch you, tilting his head back against the couch as you continue with a sudden fervor you didn’t have before.

You bob effortlessly, taking him just near the point of impossible before you’re pulling away, repeating that until you can feel that faint throb, that familiar pulse as his balls tighten with his impending orgasm and just as he reaches for your hair, ready to pull you away, you fight against it. He comes in your mouth with a low groan, gripping onto the surface of the couch in desperation.

When the pulsing finally calms you pull away, wiping at your mouth with the back of your hand and standing slowly, adjusting your clothes where they had shifted out of place slightly before taking a silent seat on the couch beside him, laying down and curling up into yourself.

You hear the dull sounds of him readjusting his pants, zipping them, shuffling slightly as he clears his throat and suddenly there is a throw being draped over you—a soft, sherpa lined blanket that immediately bathes you in warmth. 

Joel catches your gaze as you blink up at him, pausing briefly to acknowledge how lost you seem—in need of guidance. It settles in him then, dawns on his mind that this was what you were used to, wherever you had escaped from was far worse than anything he’s ever suspected. He tucks the blanket in gently and double checks the locks on the door. You’re already asleep by the time he passes by, leaning over the back of the couch to check on you.

Joel feels the guilt creep in slowly.

He should have stopped, he knows he should have. But, he didn’t.

Why? He couldn’t explain it.

The walk to his bedroom seems miles away and when he finally reaches it he’s closing the door with a dignified sigh, immediately making his way toward the en-suite bathroom and undressing his clothes—it was his second shower that day but he didn’t give a shit. 

He needed a moment to reconvene in his mind…or escape. 

Really, he just needed a distraction. It was selfish need.

The clothes pile up on the tile floor as he turns on the water, the stream shooting out of the shower head in quick spurts before it levels out and Joel steps inside, head first as the water soaks his hair, face, traveling down his body.

It wasn’t the first time he’s allowed his hand to travel to his cock within the privacy of this bathroom—a man with no one to keep his bed warm at night, or morning–or ever, really. He’s learned to cope, release some of the built up anger and frustration even if for a brief moment.

But, this was different. Because the only thing he could think of was you. The meek looks you offered, dumb-founded and lost, like a young gazelle lost in the woods. He can only imagine, suspect what you’ve been through, but the look you had given him while you took him into your mouth was something Joel couldn’t describe.

There was no clear acknowledgement, no hard line of yes and no. The lines were blurred and he doesn’t know why, but he was okay with it for a moment. Truly, you’d had all the power in the moment anyways—Joel was helpless under the touch of your mouth, a goner the second your hand touched his skin.

He tugs at his cock lazily and with no real purpose, knowing if he tried to come again so soon it wouldn’t happen, but for the brief moment of peace, he imagines you there, kneeling before him with the spray of water over your face and his cock buried in your mouth, puffing out your cheeks and how you would be so willing to do whatever he’d ask.

Obedience—that was the one thing that stuck out. You always listened when he spoke.

He could help you, he thinks. Heal you.

Or, he would fuck up and make it far worse.

He wasn’t sure if it was even worth the trouble.

-

The next morning you wake to the startling clang of pans behind you, shooting upright on the couch and snapping your head toward the kitchen to catch a glimpse of Joel’s back, shoulder blades stretched and outlined under the thin material of his shirt, clinging to his back snuggly. There’s a savory smell that breaches your nose–meat, potatoes, something of a near feast as you spot the few plates on the table stacked with various other foods.

Joel seems to sense your eyes, turning his body slightly to look behind him and your gaze quickly averting down, playing with a loose thread on the blanket as he plates the remaining food.

“Beginning of the month,” Joel explains, “usually the only time we get to eat like this.”

Joel swiftly decided that taking the route of pretending nothing ever happened was the easiest, brushing off the events of the previous night with a point to the seat near the kitchen island.

“C’mon, dig in,” He invites, “Ellie should be up soon and lord knows that kid doesn’t care about savin’ enough for the rest of us. Fill up while you can.”

Your footsteps are quiet and slow as you approach the island, the long sleeves tucked under your fingers mid-palm, crossing your arms over your chest as you look at the cacophony of items. Not sure where to start or end. Joel reaches for a plate and points to the items in order from left to right, plating a couple items with every nod you give him.

He was an enigma of a man—so brute and intimidating at a glance and he was when he needed to be, but this was a soft crack in a hard exterior, years of built up trauma intertwined with a rough world dependent on the strongest to survive. It had to level out at some point–and here that big strong man was, making up your plate and plopping a piece of bacon down before you impishly nod your head toward the pile of bacon.

“More?”

You nod quickly and Joel feels a subtle grin tug at his face, nodding in agreement with your choice as he gives you another piece. 

You eat in silence—chewing slowly and methodically as you listen to the quiet, roving chatter of people outside, neighbors readying for their day. It was a community, a town, well-oiled and rare in this world.

“Are you done hiding down in the basement?” Joel asks eventually, peeking up from his plate as he leaned against the counter adjacent the island, “Eventually you’re gonna have to talk to Tommy, get you set up with a job.”

Right. Work. Sustenance. You had to carry your own weight.

“You can talk here, you know?” Joel tells you, “You can talk, can’t you?”

Your eyes flick away briefly, avoiding the question.

“Let me try that again,” Joel clears his throat and tosses his empty plate behind him in the sink, fingers curling around the edge of the counter beside him, “Can’t?”

You shake your head.

“Won’t?”

A jerky nod as you push your own plate away.

“I’m not tryin’ to pry or force it—jus’ think it may cause problems eventually.”

You make a motion of writing with your hand shyly, hoping he’ll understand.

Joel nods jerkily and turns to rummage through a drawer in the kitchen, filled with a miscellaneous amount of junk, finding a pad of paper and a pencil and handing it over to you.

Not scared. Of you.

Joel watches as you scribble the words down and furrows his brow.

“No, I’m not sayin’ you are—”

You scratch out the words and start a new line.

If we talked, they hit. 

They?

Joel doesn’t voice the word but you see the confusion on his face.

They do nice things and we thank them. The men. If we didn’t, they would hurt us. Or kill if they were angry enough.

You scrunch your nose up slightly, looking disgruntled. Joel watches your hand shake as you continue—it didn’t help to be vague, but that fear they had instilled in you lingered like a dark, suffocating cloud.

I grew up in that place.

Bad place, Joel reminds himself. That was what you had told him and Tommy.

“People—they ain’t like that here—” Joel says, but you’re already scribbling before he can finish.

You don’t know that.

Ellie disrupts the quiet conversation with her loud entrance through the back door, looking tired as she tugged her jacket over her shoulders, pack already slung over her back.

“You’re up early,” Joel notes, preemptively handing Ellie a slice of bacon.

“Jesse wants to get an early start for the patrol since that big storm is supposed to hit tomorrow.”

Joel nods, noting how you looked between the pair curiously.

Ellie seems to notice you’re staring too, offering a casual, “Hi,” around the bacon her teeth tore into.

“Right, shoulda remembered to tell you,” Joel looks over at you, “we’ll both be gone for a few days, longer patrols with all the extra ones Tommy’s pushing at.”

“Seems pointless,” Ellie shrugs, “but…whatever.”

“You get goin’,” He tells Ellie, “I’ll catch up.”

Ellie chews at her breakfast indifferently, nodding in response as she departs, the front door closing gently behind her.

Joel gathers the dishes quietly but you feel the urge to move, helping him gather the rest of the dirty dishes and pile them into the sink. You don’t ask and he doesn’t either, but as he washes, you dry, and it feels normal.

Maybe the only normal experience you’ve had since you ended up here.

You couldn’t place your finger on him, though—Joel. One moment he was kind, talkative and curious, willing to take his time to figure out what he could about you. But, other times you felt like you were a stray dog that popped up at his doorstep and refused to leave. So, now he was forced to house you, feed you, take care of you.

So, obviously, it only made sense to take care of him.

He’d enjoyed it the first time.

Joel’s drying his hands on a towel you hand him before you’re reaching for his belt, metal clinking against metal and you tug, but you’re stopped short, his hand wrapping tightly around your wrist.

“The fuck are you doing?” Joel asks, shoving your hand away forcefully.

But, it’s the clipped, peaking anger in his tone that forces you back further.

You blink away the quickly forming tears in your eyes and retreat quickly, mouth hung open slightly in shock, frightened at the almost instantaneous shift in Joel’s voice. His face. His entire demeanor—you’ve crossed into dangerous territory, like mindless prey.

You’re amiss to the way Joel’s jaw clenches at his sudden outburst, internally shaming himself for the strain in his jeans at even just the thought of you touching him again—the willingness and eagerness of your actions, how long you’ve been conditioned into this.

He doesn’t call after you, though—only stopping by the house later that afternoon before he left to set you up with enough meals and changes of clothes to last you those three days. A knock on the door startles your timid heart, forcing you to your feet and by the time you reach the door he’s nowhere in sight. You’re thankful for that, actually. You weren’t sure if you could even look at him, fearful of the disappointment. 

There was a small note folded on top of the pile placed on the floor, unfolded with a careful touch, it read—House is all yours.

Three days, all alone.

You couldn’t bring yourself to leave that basement once.

–

When Joel returns home it’s late and he’s toeing his boots off at the door the moment he steps inside and notes the lack of warmth—a fireplace unused and the door to the basement closed shut. Ellie had already wandered off with Dina for the night, one less thing he had to worry about. He was more appreciative that she’d finally broken out of her shell and actually made a few good friends.

He ignites the fireplace, looking over his shoulder every few seconds waiting, wondering if you were waiting in anticipation—those curious eyes tracking every movement he made. He’d picked up some dessert from the mess hall on the way to his house, selfishly wanting to keep it for himself but he feels that tug, that push to extend the olive branch.

He needed to clear up this…confusion. Try—he could try, at least. 

“Sorry, I actually didn’t want you to suck my dick.”

“I enjoyed it but we shouldn’t do that again.”

“I know it’s wrong, but I didn’t want to stop you.”

Joel knows he sounds ridiculous in his head, but he was at a loss.

He’d stopped you because it was wrong–but not because he didn’t want you to.

Joel doesn’t even consider the idea that you may already be asleep for the night, pulling out the small box of dessert and a fresh pair of clothes he’d picked up alongside the food when he checked his horse back in at the stable, picking up a few other spare supplies. 

You hear him before you see him when he opens the door, those heavy boot steps thunk, thunk, thunk against the floor and you lie still, staring at him meekly as he approaches the couch adjacent to the bed in a near corner, resting the items on the table and taking a seat silently.

“You hungry?” He asks casually and your stomach growls on command despite your unwillingness to move, blanket tucked under your chin. 

He can see you shake your head slightly, easy to miss if he wasn’t staring you down.

“We need to talk,” Joel says, your eyes jolting to him suddenly, “about the other night.”

He jerks his head over, silently asking you to join him on the couch—he’s leaned back but not comfortable, his hands resting in his lap, much like the position you caught him in that night.

When you don’t move, he sighs. A deep, soft sound that has you turning over in bed to face the wall.

“I’m not asking.”

Heavy footsteps follow, the sounder closer and closer, his boots scuffing against the ground before they stop and you can feel him at your back, the whole of the bed shifting as he rests a hand on a decorative knob of the arched bed frame, creaking under his weight.

“Sit up,” He says again, “come on.”

There’s an irritation in his tone that tells you he isn’t leaving until you do, pushing up slowly and crawling to the side with your hands. The last lingering wound stings as you move, a gash on your lower back, toward your hip that you had haphazardly sewn up a few weeks ago with some sewing thread and a needle. It still hadn’t healed like the rest of your wounds. The last remaining physical memory of that time, aside from the scars.

Joel tilts his head to the side and back, noticing as you squeeze your eyes shut in pain and irritation.

“You’re still hurtin’,” It's a statement, he knows it—he can see it on your face.

You shake your head unconvincingly.

“Let me see.”

You shake again, backing into a corner but Joel is quick, he follows and leans down, pulling at the edge of your shirt that was already riding up your back, noting the red and fussed up wound by your hip—it was infected, there was no doubt in his mind.

“Does it hurt?” He asks now, “Don’t lie to me.”

Your eyes lock for a long, lingering moment before you nod, shifting away from his touch as it presses featherlight against the skin.

“I got some supplies upstairs,” He tells you absently, eyes examining the festering wound, “you need that cleaned and stitched up properly before you end up septic.”

Not that it sounded like too bad of a prospect anymore, you square yourself away as he retreats without another word, his figured disappearing out of sight as he turned the corner outside of the basement, your eyes following the sound of his footsteps and noticing the soft rustle of dust above—it took a while for you to realize his room was above yours at first.

He’s back swiftly, a trove of supplies in one arm and a wooden chair in the other, hauling them like they weighed nothing, sleeves already rolled up at his elbows. The chair skirts the ground, squealing loudly as Joel brings it near the edge of the bed and motions for you to turn around and face the wall. 

Again, not asking.

With shaky hands and fingers you move, slowly until you back meets Joel’s fingers at your shoulder, curled up into a fist and pressing gently into your skin.

“Lift your shirt,” You grab the edges, ready to strip it over your head before Joel grabs your bicep and stops you, “—that’s—that’s fine, alright? Just hold it there.”

Joel slowly cuts away the old thread and removes the old stitching with a careful hand. You bite at your bottom lip until it draws blood. It unsettles Joel with how quiet you are, even now. Not a word or a single sound or expression of pain, just white knuckles gripping the shirt bunched under your chest and your head tucked down as you shake with a silent cry.

“Stop movin’,” He says brutishly, cleaning up the wound with an antiseptic that makes you squirm away slightly, “I’m almost finished.”

He cleans, re-stitches and covers up the wound with minimal effort, like he’s done this a million times before. And you hear the shake of a pill bottle behind you, whipping your head around quickly.

“S’just antibiotics,” Joel explains, “we picked away at a pharmacy a few months back that had a decent supply,” He pours one into his hand before it rolls to his fingers and he’s handing it off to you—as he suspects, you eye it wearily, “look, your choice. I got enough here to clear that up within a week or you can continue to suffer, not my problem.”

Reluctantly, you take the pill from him and dry swallow it down with a small, nearly silent wince.

There was no reason to trust Joel, but you did.

At some point between the walk from your bed to the table, Joel realizes he’d bypassed the entire reason he had come down here–to talk. About it. That instance you were both dancing around, the one he’d fended off the second time with a barking, heavy voice.

His lingering presence is hard to ignore and you grip the edge of the bed, standing on your own two feet with his back turned to you.

He’d helped you again. Maybe you wanted to thank him.

Or you just wanted a distraction from the pain, the creeping loneliness. 

He’s so distracted he doesn’t hear your footsteps approach him, a newly found vigor as you pull at his forearm and turn him with a sudden strength Joel wasn’t expecting, sending him tumbling on his heels to the couch. He sees it in your eyes then, the task you’re focused on, already undressed from the waist down, the length of the shirt reaching a few centimeters short of mid–thigh to cover your naked down as you climb onto his lap and Joel allows it.

He doesn’t yell or scream, there is no apprehensiveness there. Not now.

He could sit in your eyes—this was coping with whatever you couldn’t bring yourself to face, unspoken trust that you didn’t want to voice. This was a distraction for him too.

He could fight this off, but Joel never considered himself a great man. Or, really even a decent one. And, as you work at his belt, he finds his hands joining your own, struggling for a moment before he’s yanking the leather from the belt loops and unbuttoning his jeans as you pull at his zipper, lifting slightly off his lap as he pushes his jeans down to his calves—there was a beauty to how easily your bodies worked against each other, your push to his pull. 

Wordless, he knew what you wanted. And you knew exactly what to give him.

He was like the bad men, but wholly different.

The wonder and admiration in his eyes told you so, even if they were quickly clouded by desire and lust, his face suddenly stoic as you grab at his cock, tugging it to full hardness within seconds before you’re dragging the tip of his cock down the center of your cunt before sinking down harshly—and the hands stilled at his sides finally act. 

He’s careful of the wound on your hip, dragging his fingers over your ass and to your thighs, fingers curling around the back of your bent knees to pull and tug you in, groaning quietly into the thick, thready material of your top as you curl into him.

He couldn’t bear the idea of looking at you, watching you as you moved so eagerly against his cock, soft breaths at his ears that made him wanton for the sounds you couldn’t make, the terrible vocal paralysis like a vice anytime someone looked in your direction, especially him. Your palms press into the wall behind him, dull fingertips clawing at chipped paint as you bounced your hips fiercely, quick and efficient in the process. It was clear you’ve done this before—detached and just a means to an end, a device of pleasure.

And Joel uses it, selfishly. One hand falling to the back of your neck to curl you in further, the other at your ass as he squeezes, guiding your hips down to the sharp, pointed thrust of his own movements and Joel can already feel that familiar cole in his groin—days of staving of his own need for release from the sheer amount of guilt he felt over this, somehow ending up here again. 

Using you—and maybe you could admit it yourself, it was just as much a distraction for you as for him, but the sudden warmth in your chest is startling. You could come like this, the drag of his cock hitting so deep inside of you with every thrust that your visions starts to white—a mix of delirium and pure euphoria, the gasp that leaves your mouth is broken and barely audible but Joel can hear it, feeling you tip over that cliff with a hand tangled in his hair, needing an anchor and finding that it was him in that moment.

But, you don’t stop either. Working through the crest of your orgasm with a reflexive squeeze of your cunt as you came apart and pulled him in, his balls tightening in warning as they slapped against your cunt with each drop of your hips and Joel tries to warn you, pushes gently at your hips but you don’t move—won’t. And he comes inside of you with a muffled, tired grunt as he pants into your shirt.

Whatever mutual agreement was made had become void.

“Get off,” He says after a beat, but doesn’t push. 

You listen, moving off of him and turning away immediately, arms tucked around your middle as you eyed the fresh clothes and still uneaten slice of dessert, one that Joel had offered to share.

A peace offering, an act of forgiveness. But, that was all shattered and swept away now.

“You stupid, girl?” Joel asks suddenly, turning to him at the harsh words and finding him re-dressed, brow drawn in as he snatches his belt in his right hand, gripping it tight. “That your master plan, here?”

You’re confused and Joel’s eyes drag to your legs, unseen but you can feel his cum dripping down your thighs, pushing out of your cunt as it pulses from the comedown of your own orgasm.

“Gettin’ knocked up and hopin’ that a baby will keep you safe here?”

You were safe nowhere and you knew that.

Joel had no idea, but you couldn’t even begin to explain how wrong he was.

Babies, even the prospect of that idea made your skin crawl.

So, with frustration evident on his face and already anticipating your answer, you shake your head.

“You try that shit again and I’ll—”

You brow raises in anticipation and Joel opens his mouth slightly before he clenches his jaw.

“Knew it was a fuckin’ mistake taking you in.”

And it feels like a gut punch, but he was right.

Joel tosses the pill bottle on the table and you watch as it lands, rolls before hitting the floor and stopping just at your bare toes.

He departs with a deep scowl, door slamming behind him and you wait, count the steps until you hear his footsteps above the basement and you wander over toward the table.

The remnants of the items he’d brought with the intentions of a one-sided conversation, a lecture, really.

It was pointless now.

Opening the container to the uneaten dessert, you sniffed it testingly before swiping a single finger over the icing on top, pressing the sweet, sugar cream against your tongue and letting your eyes drift closed at the flavor, giving yourself a few seconds to enjoy and savor before you’re ripping into the thing with your bare hands, a fuck you the peace offering Joel was trying for.

There was no peace to be had. You would never find peace here, either. 

A new emotion floods your body—not anger or rage, but jealousy, greed. You wanted him, and deep within, you knew he wanted you too. Even if just in a primal way, a means to distract. 

And in your sudden, newfound boldness and curiosity you linger toward the kitchen in a fresh change of clothes for that night, snatching up the notepad Joel had left out from your previous conversation before scribbling the rest of that out and ripping off a jagged piece of paper.

It was a thank you.

Flipping it over, you continue the message.

There is no plan. I trust you.

You fold the paper up and wander down the hall, counting the steps until you land at a closed door, one that you can only assume and hope is Joel’s and slip the paper under the gap at the bottom of the door.

There was a chance, the anticipation that Joel could convince Tommy to strand you out into the forest again, forced back into harsh survival, but something tells you Joel doesn’t have it in him, not anymore.

Joel catches the sight of your departing shadow as he retreats toward his bed, the paper flying across the floor with the sudden draft and landing right at his feet, he picks it up and readies to trash it without a thought before he catches sight of that simple phrase.

thank you – no plan —

Joel pauses, reading over the final set of words with a dangerous tug in his heart. 

I trust you.

That tug was guilt and the creeping sensation of doom.

Trust. You.

He’s really fucked up now.

divider creds: @/cafekitsune